The Food Industry and The Food Pyramid

At the time I am writing this, obesity is becoming the most significant health problem in the United States, and is about to replace smoking as the number one cause of preventable diseases. With Federal Health organizations targeting this mounting epidemic, and an informed public being the best defense against health problems, scrutiny is gathering around one of the American Government’s most well-known health-guides: The Food Pyramid.

USDA Food Pyramid

Designing a nutritional guide is not an easy task. The Pyramid must explain extremely complex nutritional requirements in as simple a manner as possible. Balancing ease of comprehension with comprehensive explanations. Not only does the pyramid fail to simplify its suggestions, it outright gets many things completely wrong.

Here are just three examples:

Carbohydrates

The Pyramid correctly distinguishes between complex and simple carbohydrates, but draws the line at the wrong place. It lists bread, cereal, and pasta as complex carbohydrates, but most nutritionists consider refined grains, such as these, simple carbs. Oatmeal is a complex carbohydrate. Fruit Loops is a simple one.

Servings

If the Pyramid errors on the side of not providing enough information on specific food groups, it also errors on the side of making a “serving” too complex. 1 Slice of Bread equals 1 Ounce of Cereal equals 1/2 cup of Pasta. 3 Ounces of Meat equals 1/2 Cup of Beans equals 2 Tablespoons of Peanut Butter. This is far too much to think about in meal preparation and turns off many people… at least it turns me off. Compare this to Bill Philips’ solution: a serving is the size of your fist.

Lean Meats

Steak, Veal, and Pork Chops are at the top of this list. Chicken and Turkey appear below them, although chicken and turkey are the two leanest meats. Legumes, or Beans, the leanest of all protein sources and is also rich in fiber, does not appear in the list at all.

How do so many gross distortions enter the equation? How do brand name, “junk-food” cereals get the same status as basic oatmeal? How do beef and veal top turkey? Not by listing them alphabetically. How did veal get listed as a nutritional protein source and not legumes?

HOW DID 15 to 26 TOTAL FREAKING SERVINGS OF FOOD GET IN THERE???

Take a look at the value of the industries that provide these foods getting equality with or priority over far more healthy options. Who benefits from Americans consuming excessive quantities of carbohydrates and meat? Who has the most influence over the body that defines the Food Pyramid, who influences the USDA? There is a conflict of interest at work here.

Imagine if we reduced the food pyramid to three food groups: protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables. No fat. No cholesterol. The Dairy industry would flip out. The Beef industry would spread commercials denouncing the Government across the airwaves.

Is this conspiracy? As far as the Food Pyramid is concerned, I leave that to you to decide and have provided some links, food for thought if you will, to help you:

Food Politics

http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2003-05-21/eatbeat.html

Problems

http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall02/Greene/problems.htm

History

http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall02/Greene/history.htm

…but let’s look into the past and see how another industry affected what we knew about another scientific debate.

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The Tobacco Lobby and Cancer Research

Public Relations campaigns disguised as Science

The “Surgeon General’s Warning” on the packs of Marlboro’s I smoked for ten years read: “Smoking By Pregnant Women May Result in
Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight.” We used to joke that we were safe from cancer so long as we continued smoking the “pregnancy” cigarettes. There are many other ways the Tobacco industry gets around and suppresses public knowledge their product’s dangers.

For instance:

Philip Morris used public relations firms and lawyers to develop a “sound science” program in the United States and Europe that involved recruiting other industries and issues to obscure the tobacco industry’s role. The European “sound science” plans included a version of “good epidemiological practices” that would make it impossible to conclude that secondhand smoke-and thus other environmental toxins-caused diseases.

Suppressing Unwanted Results

On May 12, 1994, nearly 4000 pages of reports, memorandums, and letters generated by Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation and the British American Tobacco Company over a thirty-year time span surfaced at UCSF thanks to an employee at the company. For a year, the data was analyzed, compiled, and finally published in the July 19, 1995, issue of the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA). The results were instantly devastating to the Tobacco Industry as the documents revealed:

• Research conducted by tobacco companies into the deleterious health effects of tobacco was more advanced and sophisticated than studies by the medical community.
• Executives at Brown and Williamson knew early on that tobacco use was harmful, nicotine was addictive, and decided to conceal these facts from the public.
• The industry sent research data through their legal departments in order to establish lawyer-client relationship privileges and hide their research from the courts.
• Despite demonstrated knowledge to the contrary, the industry’s public position was that the link between smoking and ill health was not proven, that they were dedicated to determining whether there was such a link and revealing this to the public, and that nicotine was not addictive.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Outspend Them

When the largest European study on second-hand smoke, conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), demonstrated a 16% increase in the point estimate of risk in lung cancer for nonsmokers, Philip Morris, fearing increased restrictions on smoking in Europe, launched a three-pronged attack on the study through industry-directed scientific studies, a media campaign to shape public opinion, and governmental lobbying effort to prevent legislation that would restrict smoking in public places. The IARC study cost $2 million over ten years; Philip Morris planned to spend $2 million in one year alone and up to $4 million on research.

Sources Cited:

Constructing “sound science” and “good epidemiology”: tobacco, lawyers, and public relations firms.
Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco 94143-0130, USA.

Environmental tobacco smoke. The Brown and Williamson documents.
Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, USA.

Lawyer control of internal scientific research to protect against products liability lawsuits. The Brown and Williamson documents.
Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco, USA.

Tobacco industry efforts subverting International Agency for Research on Cancer’s second-hand smoke study.
Cardiovascular Research Institute, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, 94143-0130, USA.

Further Reading:

Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, University of California, San Francisco

National Cancer Institute: Cancer Control Research

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Industry and Global Warming

Our Invisible Problem Child

There is a simple chemical reaction occurring in automobile engines, power plants, industrial complexes, and even campfires around the world. The carbon collected by living organisms in the form of wood, oil, and coal is being combined with oxygen molecules and put through a combustion process to release their stored energy. The process is often imperfect, resulting in a chemical byproduct:

C + O₂ –> CO₂

Carbon Dioxide, CO₂, is a very important component of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is transparent to light energy, but not to thermal and infrared energies. In other words, it allows light energy to hit the Earth’s surface, where it is converted to heat energy, and then prevents the heat energy from radiating into space. Without CO₂, the Earth’s mean temperature would be 20 Degrees Celsius below the freezing point of water.

At present levels, CO₂ keeps the Earth’s mean temperature at 13 Degrees Celsius above zero. When these levels increase, more thermal and infrared energy gets trapped. Many factors are helping to increase CO₂ levels in our environment: burning fossil fuels, agricultural burning, and cutting down trees, which remove CO₂ from the air to make wood. Data suggests these elevating levels of CO₂ are raising the mean temperature of the Earth. This is the basis for Global Warming Theory, around which a debate that affects the entire human race is being waged.

The Facts So Far

• “CO2 concentrations have increased from about 280 ppmv in pre-industrial times to 358 ppmv in 1994. There is no doubt that this increase is largely due to human activities, in particular fossil fuel combustion, but also land-use conversion and to a lesser extent cement production. ” (IPCC WGI (1996, p 14))
• “The mean global surface temperature has increased by about 0.3 to 0.6°C since the late 19th century and by about 0.2 to 0.3°C over the last 40 years, which is the period with most reliable data.”
• “Seven of the ten warmest years in the 20th century occurred in the 1990s.”
• “mountain glaciers the world over are receding; the Arctic ice pack has lost about 40% of its thickness over the past four decades; the global sea level is rising about three times faster over the past 100 years compared to the previous 3,000 years; and there are a growing number of studies that show plants and animals changing their range and behavior in response to shifts in climate.”
• Droughts, Floods, Storm Systems and extremes of temperature into both hot and cold are all increasing, just as Global Warming Theory predicts.
• These facts are supported by a “consensus of 2,500 scientists – including eight Nobel Laureates – who comprise the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

The Unknown Variables

When speaking of climate change, we must acknowledge that we are attempting to predict trends in a system so complex as to make it chaotic. We cannot forget the infinitesimal effect of the butterfly’s wings. On the future of Global Warming, there are additional effects that will have indeterminate positive and negative feedbacks.

As the Earth warms, more water will evaporate into the atmosphere, generating greater cloud coverage. Clouds reflect more light back into space, which will reduce the warming of the Earth. Another negative feedback is that greater production of CO₂ will promote additional plant growth. Plants strip CO₂ from the atmosphere, combating greenhouse gases.

At the same time these effects may take place, the polar ice caps will recede. The ice caps reflect light back to space, so without them the Earth will absorb more light and convert it to thermal radiation. Also, as the Earth warms, more water vapor will enter the atmosphere. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, having a positive feedback on Global Warming.

Both of these are known unknown effects, but there are also many unknown unknowns. Bogs, for instance, contain large quantities of methane gas from decomposing organic matter in their depths. As the Earth warms, this methane production may increase. Methane is a greenhouse gas. This variable was only discovered in recent years. What else don’t we know about?

The Skeptics

While there are many critics of Global Warming Theory motivated by a healthy Scientific Skepticisms, there are also many who object to the costliness of solving the problem due to profit motivations. In 1989, for instance, 46 corporations and trade associations established the Global Climate Coalition to push a multi-million dollar advertising campaign against the Kyoto Protocol and fund studies on the economic costs of mitigating climate change. The conservative think tank George Marshall Institute publishes numerous reports downplaying the severity of global climate change, including one report that was very influential in the Bush Sr. Administration’s policies, which claimed variations in the sun’s intensity would offset the effects of global warming.

The Western Fuel’s Association directly funded the Greening Earth Society and is connected with Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide & Global Change. Both of these organizations work tirelessly to push the meme that CO₂ emissions are good for the planet and that coal is the best energy source available.

In September 2002, the Bush administration removed a section on climate change from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) annual air pollution report, even though the climate issue had been discussed in the report in each of the preceding five years. In June 2003, the White House tried to make a series of changes to the EPA’s draft Report on the Environment. The EPA report stated that human activity is contributing significantly to climate change. The entire section on climate change was ultimately deleted from the version released for public comment.

Outspend, omit, and deluge with spurious studies… Sound familiar?

Fighting for a Stalemate

The tactic being employed by these groups is not one of proving that global warming does not exist, or even disproving the scientific results. They employ media relations campaigns, heavy advertising, spurious scientific studies. Their deluge of memes drown out the voice of Scientific Consensus.

All these opponents do is to raise doubts. You only have 150-thousand years worth of climate data to base your theory on. You can’t know for certain that this isn’t just a natural warming trend. You don’t know that negative feedback variables in the Earth won’t reverse Global Warming.

In order to subvert the dominant Scientific Conclusions, the interested party simply muddles the argument, introducing an endless stream of factors unaccounted for in studies in order to prevent action. They aren’t seeking to win the argument, merely to stalemate it. Keep the proponents of Global Warming Theory on the defensive to prevent any action from taking place.

Proponents admit that there exists a tremendous number of variables unaccounted for in Global Warming Theory, but the possible consequences of Global Warming mean we cannot leave this debate in limbo. If the positive feedback variables outweigh the negative feedback variables, the Earth’s climate could reach a “snapping point,” where Greenhouse Gases reach a runaway state and the environment transforms into something else entirely. We already know what such a state would look like by observing our closest neighbor, Venus, where an overabundance of greenhouse gases have rendered the planet a near-molten soup, completely uninhabitable.

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Sources Cited:

Sagan, Carl. “Ambush, The Warming of the World,” Billions and Billions, 1997, Ballantine Books.

IPCC WG I, 1996. Houghton, J. and others.

Observed Climate Trends

Responding to Global Warming Skeptics
— Prominent Skeptics Organizations

Climate Change Research Distorted and Suppressed

Countering the Skeptics

Should you join the “Looney Left” or “Radical Right”? First let’s define the terms Left and Right with their synonyms in American Politics “Liberal” and “Conservative”. In a world of verbally incontinent partisans, we have lost their true meaning:

Liberal – Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

Conservative – One who desires to maintain existing institutions and customs; also, one who holds moderate opinions in politics; — opposed to revolutionary or radical.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

Great words aren’t they? I don’t know about you, but I think both of these words describe my take on life. They aren’t as diametrically opposed as one would expect watching television or reading the opinion section.

Looking at these simple and accurate definitions, we can easily identify with both of them. I am conservative when I deposit money in the bank. I am liberal when I go to a new restaurant. These are not great evils that we can attribute all the world’s problems to, they are virtues, equally good and bad depending on the situation and the extreme to which they are taken.

However, we aren’t looking at these words for what they mean in everyday life, we are discussing their importance in American Politics, where these words are taking on increasingly extensive meanings and connotations that have nothing to do with faith in progressive versus established means–but I’m relegating that part of the political issue to Party VS Ideology.

No. Here I want to talk purely about the implications of this dichotomy. Namely, I want to focus on how the two-dimensional nature of American Political Discourse prohibits the Public from debating the four-dimensions of Politics, the other two being Libertarian VS Communitarian.

Liberals who lean toward in Governmental mediation of economic processes are known as “Communitarians.” Conservatives who lean toward Governmental mediation of social processes are known as “Authoritarians.” People, both liberal and conservative, who believe in less Government are known as “Libertarians”. An overwhelming majority of Americans test out as highly libertarian, but only moderately liberal or conservative.

Unfortunately, our political system is split along liberal and conservative lines rather than libertarian and communitarian/authoritarian ones. I think the problem is that our (federal) government is heavily communitarian/authoritarian. If we think of it as a business, then it has every motivation to continually inflate its budget. Both Democrats and Republicans are wholly communitarian and authoritarian, they advocate new spending measures only. They work for the federal beast and the nature of that animal is to grow.

Republicans and Democrats differentiating themselves along left/right arguments has the effect of ignoring the possibility of less government for everyone. Look at their exorbitant Congressional Salaries, not to mention retirement packages. Do you really think these people want a smaller Government that might turn them back into Public Servants? Neither party wants to bite the invisible hand of their federal meal ticket.

So they keep us bickering over liberal/conservative lines while the beast gets bigger. Left VS Right is a red herring. If people can put away their hatred for the opposition and recognize this every-growing problem, we might be able to do something about it.

Two Dimensional Politics Equals Two Choices, left and right. Adding a third dimension to our political spectrum squares the number of choices. Instead of liberal and conservative, we would have Liberal-Communitarian, Conservative-Authoritarian, Liberal-Libertarian, and Conservative-Libertarian.

Why stop there? Why settle for replacing a dichotomy with a quadrachotomy (Is that a word?)? We know there are many many many degrees of belief within the political spectrum and people do not fall wholly into any one spot on the graph. If the American political system were to accommodate a myriad of political parties, we would not only reduce the “Party VS Ideology” fallacy, but would increase voter turn out. Thinking of our Democracy in capitalist terms, there are entire market demographics being ignored in the current system.

So how do we get a third party, and more, into the mix? First we must overcome the current monopoly the two parties hold and remove the barriers to getting third parties on the ballots. The Democrats and Republicans themselves are interests a system that allows them to monopolize discourse and harvest immense profits out of it. These establishments will do anything to prevent additional parties from destabilizing their status quo. In the past, Republicans sabotaged the Reform Party and Democrats hindered the Green party to prevent these alternatives from “siphoning off” votes that would otherwise go to the established dichotomy.

So the biggest problem is the established system, which favors the large political power-consuming machines because of its “winner takes all” nature. For this reason, simple fixes to the Electoral College are the easiest and least threatening way to create more party options. There are several very simple changes to our voting process that would facilitate the inclusion of additional parties.

One example is a ballot that allows the voter to rank their choices. This would allow voters the ability to give their preference to a third party candidate, and should that party fail to win sufficient votes, the voter’s ballot would indicate their second and third choices. Democrats and Republicans would not only cease to be threatened by third parties, but could actually benefit from their common ideologies. There are also slightly more complex methods that do not require revising the Constitution.

So, let’s pretend you’re sold on a particular solution. How do we get it on the ballot? With the ultimate of ironies: The Single Issue Party.

That’s right, a Party that runs on a single issue: Modifying the Electoral Process to provide additional parties to get into power. Of course, in a political world as complex as ours, such a party would not be viable. It would have no chance of getting elected, but it would siphon enough votes from the establishment to threaten them. Most likely, one party would agree to adopt the Single Issue Party’s stance on the matter in order to gain its support.

Would you vote for this single issue?

The Seventh Seal

Antonius Block has returned from 10 years in Crusades to the shores of Sweden, a country being ravaged by the plague. There, on the beach, he meets Death, and knows that it is his time. Antonius challenges Death to a chess match, if he wins, Death must let him go free. Death agrees and chooses one of Antonius’ fists, which opens to reveal a black piece.

“It becomes me well,” Death says with a smile.

So begins a philosophical journey, a quest for “certainty.” Antonius is buying himself time through the chess game, a chance to find evidence of something beyond life and death, concrete evidence. We know Antonius’ faith is shaken, and we suspect his experiences in the Crusades are the cause. As his Squire, Jons, explains at one point, the Crusades were “so stupid that only an idealist could have thought it out.”

The film is rich with witty and poetic dialogue. Consider this passage, when Jons returns to Antonius after seeking directions from a man resting against a rock, only to discover a rotting corpse slouched there:

Antonius: Did he show you the way?

Jons: Not exactly.

Antonius: What did he say?

Jons: Nothing.

Antonius: Was he mute?

Jons: No milord. He was most eloquent.

Antonius: Indeed.

Jons: But very gloomy.

Antonius’ solemn seriousness is contrasted by Joseph, a free-spirited performer who sees spiritual visions, which he tells to his wife, Mary. His visions are an odd thing, and help to illustrate the conundrum that frustrates Antonius so. Joseph’s visions are partly real and partly his imagination.

Even if partly real, what is their nature? Belief is something deeply personal. No matter how your neighbor’s experiences influenced their faith, they are not your experiences. Antonius expresses the difficulty of “believing the believers.” There is also the issue of believing one’s own beliefs.

Is faith merely a warm blanket some pull over themselves to avoid thinking about the grim finality we all must face alone? Even a young girl accused of having carnal knowledge of the Devil finds comfort in believing it. The preacher and soldiers all saw the Devil with her, so she believes them, hoping the Devil will protect her from the flames. Antonius looks into her eyes, however, and finds only terror.

The film is such a strange and wonderful mixture of heavy philosophy and comedy, each side of this dualism equally effective. Director Ingmar Bergman’s incarnation of Death is a cordial and sympathetic character who also has a sense of humor. The character has appeared in numerous other films, such as “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.” In fact, many of the films images have appeared elsewhere, as the final scene, which was lovingly emulated in “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.”

This contrast between heavy and light illustrates the only answerable question the film presents us. How should we spend our lifetimes? Should we consume our time on Earth buried in concerns about the afterlife, as the flagellates, ceaselessly beating themselves in an attempt to evoke God’s mercy? Or should we emulate Joseph, and enjoy the time we have in love and song and merrymaking? Keeping in mind the ultimately unknowable nature of what comes after this world, it would seem the answer is obvious.