Food woes
A dog’s breakfast? Calorie consciousness, diets, nutrition ills
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![While much of the world worries about putting food on the table, we gulp diet supplements and fake fats in order to stuff our faces
Published: The Vancouver Sun, February 10, 2001 Op-ed column
By Deborah Jones
It's always an adventure to wander through Granville Island Market, stroke a fuzzy New Zealand kiwi, choose a local vine tomato and marvel at how a vile-smelling Asian durian can taste heavenly. A luscious display at a great deli rivals any museum or art show. Absolutely nothing matches a great restaurant for its ability to sate, blissfully and completely, the senses. Cooking with attitude is more fun than being a kid elbow-deep in finger paint.
Food is great. We Canadians are fortunate to have access to so much of it, and it's sad that much of the world is starving. So why does all this food make us so sick?
It's Eating Disorders Awareness Week, a time for stories about obesity, bulimia and anorexia. The other day, after hearing radio interviews with teenagers struggling with these deadly disorders, my own teens announced plans for a fast at their high school to help tackle Third World hunger. And that's when I realized just how utterly neurotic our society has become about food.
Our hang-up of choice has historically been sex. We're still pretty weird about sex, but food is overtaking it as a source of angst. We all succumb. The other day, I was sitting with a bunch of friends at lunch. Before tucking in, most of us -- including me -- performed a ritual expression of concern about eating too much or being too fat, then questioned whether we'd burned off enough energy while skiing to have dessert. It was sort of like saying grace, without any "grace."
Another time, another meal, a friend tells a modern horror story. A neighbour girl refuses to eat, is wasting away. Her parents are distraught. But at least they're not suffering alone: 10 per cent of kids in the girl's class have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. An urban legend? I wish. Eating disorders increasingly trouble North American schools, so that anorexia is almost common among adolescent girls, a phase like discarding Barbie dolls and buying a first bra. Researchers estimate one per cent of girls and women have anorexia nervosa, and four per cent have bulimia.
Such afflictions are mostly peculiar to developed nations, says Shona Goodrich, clinical director of the eating disorder program at St. Paul's hospital, a sociologist who recently visited Belize and Guatemala. In such less developed countries, says Goodrich, eating disorders are "not a problem, it's not even an issue."
The greatest threat to our ancestor's survival was lack of food, and food shortages still blight the health of millions. Aid agencies figure that every second of every day someone, somewhere, dies of causes related to starvation or malnutrition.
This month, my own kids will join others across Canada and in other wealthy countries in a "30-Hour Famine," organized by World Vision to raise money for food aid. It's a worthy cause, but I find it a tad disconcerting to see kids gathering in high schools that are dealing with eating disorders in a massive fast to provide food for others.
People before us knew that famine is a horror. From fames, the Latin word for hunger, it was caused by droughts, foods, earthquakes, insect plagues, plant disease, wars, sieges and even deliberate crop destruction -- food warfare as effective then as bombs or anthrax would be today.
Adults in famine lose weight, children suffer retarded growth, eventually people die off, not only from starving but because their frail bodies can't fight infections. Such threat of starvation is why, in most previous societies and in plenty of places today, plump people are considered beautiful and skinny folk are pitiable. Until the last half century, artists celebrated fat, and relegated images of skinny people to their visions of hell.
Compare that sensibility with today's image of a desirable female, epitomized by actress Calista Flockhart, a waif-like creature who resembles a child's stick drawing.
Of course health research plays a big role in our perceptions. Researchers have linked fat with disease, from increased incidence of cancer to diabetes, and a whole generation has embraced slimness. Alas, we've reduced fat by changing food patterns, rather than the healthy method of burning calories with physical activity.
Worse, as fat in food has decreased, dietitians say we've compensated by eating more, and now 30 per cent of adults and 11 to 24 per cent of children are obese, says dietitian Ryna Levy Milne of the faculty of agricultural sciences at the University of B.C.
Obesity, in turn, has opened a market for synthetic fat products like Olestra, a food supplement which mimics the taste and "mouth feel" of fat, but which our bodies cannot absorb and so which pass through our system in a ghostly way, leaving behind no calories. Meanwhile, new drugs that block fat absorption in our bodies are being tested on obese children.
"The only people benefiting are the companies that produce and distribute these products," says Levy Milne. "Studies show that many people who consume Olestra compensate for the loss of fat calories with other foods. With both products, there are gastrointestinal side affects that could result in great discomfort; side-effects such as anal leakage." Maybe anal leakage is why users have such a love/hate relationship with Olestra they post haiku poetry about the stuff on the Internet.
The causes and implications of our eating disorders are still being untangled by sociologists, psychologists and countless distraught family members watching loved ones wasting away. They're often called a mental health problem, but I'm guessing they're more of a societal health problem, in that our society has an increasingly unhealthy attitude towards food.
From her travels, Goodrich has observed that "People living in less developed nations still have their culture very much intact. They don't feel as alienated from themselves, their environment and from each other as we do ... and the nurturing aspects of food have not been disrupted and are still very much intact and part of their identity."
While people in less developed places nurture each other with food, we wealthy people can sign up for an Internet list to become eating disordered. Messages posted to the list are heart-rending. "God, I can't believe how FAT I am ... will someone PLEASE send me some SERIOUS THINSPIRATION," writes a person who signs her name "fatuglybitch."
The list moderator at tipsforanorexics complies, with suggestions mailed out to all subscribers. "Pinch your ear, lose your appetite." "Check your head. Never eat anything bigger than your head, even lettuce. You'll only stretch your stomach out." "Don't Swallow! Models and other successful bodies are also known for taking a forbidden bite, chewing, and spitting it out." "If you live alone but with children, make a small meal you do not like but your child does."
The number one suggestion advises people to tie a lifesaver to a long string, swallow it, then pull the string to cause a gag reaction and purge the food in your stomach. Alternatively, "When you are hungrey [sic] do something gross like dig for worms, clean a kitty litter box or something . . . it will make you just not hungrey [sic]."
Let's think about this. In wealthy countries, people gulp drugs and food supplements in order to eat like carefree pigs, or become so fat-phobic they develop eating disorders that kill them. Meanwhile, people elsewhere die from lack of food. Words are inadequate to describe this paradox, but let's try: Offensive. Grotesque. Obscene.
Copyright Deborah Jones 2001
Ignorance root of nutrition ills, professor says
Nutritionist at cancer conference slams multimillion-dollar industry “which capitalizes on people's fears of food additives and pollution” and promotes medically unsound fad diets
Published: The Globe and Mail, February 11, 1985
By DEBORAH JONES/HALIFAX
Taxpayers spent millions on medical treatment for diseases caused by poor nutrition, advertisers spent millions more pushing unhealthy food, and government cutbacks completed a vicious circle by reducing prevention, Canadian Cancer Society members were told on the weekend.
"Promotion of misinformation, while not new, is on the upswing, with increasing disregard for nutrition and medical science," Elizabeth Lambie, an associate professor at Dalhousie University's School of Nursing, told a forum on cancer and diet on Saturday. "There's presently a multimillion-dollar industry which capitalizes on people's fears of food additives and pollution and (people's) hopes of being freed of disease."
Medically unsound fad diets that purport to cure or prevent disease are often followed by people ignorant of sound nutrition, she said. At the same time, she said, school classes in nutrition are considered as "frills" and are often the first to be cut in today's climate of financial restraint.
Sophisticated advertising of questionable products ranging from fad diets to products such as Tang orange juice, which Mrs. Lambie said contains unnecessary sugar and some fat as well as added vitamin C, along with poorly researched articles in popular magazines such as Prevention contribute to the problem.
A recent study of students in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley showed that only 10 per cent of the children researched knew the bare minimum about the Canada Food Guide, she said. "Nutrition is not taught enough."
University students living away from home for the first time often do not know what type of food to prepare, Mrs. Lambie said, and some follow well-advertised fad diets that are said to be healthy and cheap, such as ones that eliminate meat. Some such students have recently had children with low birth weights, rickets and scurvy, she noted.
Community nutrition programs are being cut as governments try to reduce deficits, she said. "It's so easy to cut back on prevention in the health- care system because nobody notices." Although cutting salaries of nutritionists may save dollars immediately, Mrs. Lambie told the group, society pays at the other end when people develop diseases related to nutrition. "Eating habits can be changed, but it takes a long time and a lot of skill . . . and it boils down to political decisions."
Copyright Deborah Jones 1985
Big business blamed for food crisis
Published: Canadian Press, The Vancouver Sun, April 23, 1988
Deborah Jones/Halifax
Halifax - THE WAY food is grown and distributed around the world is destroying the environment, causing millions of people to starve and jeopardizing future food sources, a food conference was told this week.
While there is more than enough food produced to feed everyone, massive and complex economic, political and distribution problems result in most of it going to rich countries while the poor suffer, several experts on food issues told the conference on the effects of big business on the global food system.
"Every year 15 million people die of hunger, three-quarters of them children," while worldwide food production is on the rise even in troubled areas such as drought-plagued Africa, writer Carole Giangrande said.
One cause of the massive disparity between have and have-not countries is that many Third World farmers have stopped traditional mixed farming and become dependent on cash crops such as coffee, tea and sugar, the teachers attending the conference at Saint Mary's University were told.
Finbar Desir, a lecturer at a Nova Scotia agricultural school and former agricultural engineer in the Caribbean, partly blamed multinational corporations that have "enticed (Third World farmers) into exclusive production of these crops to the detriment of their own food crops."
When the prices of such commodities drop or they lose their appeal - as has happened with sugar with the development of artificial sweeteners - farmers find themselves with an inedible product and no money to buy food for their families.
Further, Desir said, western agricultural methods have been forced on poor countries by well-meaning westerners, resulting in ecological destruction.
"Agricultural experts come from North America and say 'Gee, this is chaos.' So they cut down the trees (and introduce chemicals and machinery) and the soil suffers.
"It is only in recent years that scientists . . . have come to realize the western way is not the best way. They are beginning to realize the traditional methods of agriculture, which have been carried on for thousands of years, have survived because they maintained the soil."
While the Third World is suffering, all is not well at home, said Giangrande. "North American farmers are being pushed out of business as they get caught in the squeeze between low farm-gate prices and the high cost of growing food," she said. "Ironically, while these farmers go broke many urban people line up at food banks because they can't afford the high food prices at the supermarket."
Dalhousie University plant soil biologist David Patriquin said biology is the key issue, but it is hardly ever addressed when people talk about food production. He used a scathing attack on modern lawn-care techniques to illustrate his argument of how modern agriculture is self-destructive because it ignores biological basics.
In a lawn, grass and clover help each other grow and chemicals are not needed, he said. But when the lawn is fertilized, the added nitrogen harms the clover. And as the clover dies, the role it played in providing nitrogen and keeping weeds down has to be taken over by increasing amounts of chemicals. Finally, he said wryly, clover has now been relegated to the status of a weed and is attacked with herbicide.
Similar vicious cycles begun by chemical interference with nature are destroying systems throughout the world, he said, including the Canadian Prairies which have only about 100 years of fertility left.
"The environmental problems are horrendous, not to mention human suffering. . . . Thousands of deaths every year are directly attributable to acute pesticide poisoning."
The views of Giangrande, Desir and Patriquin were challenged by George McClure, vice-president of McCain Foods Ltd., who defended the methods of big businesses as the best way of producing food.
"Global access to food is enhanced by an agribusiness industry which is allowed and encouraged to be efficient in the economic sense of the wopd," he said.
"Efficiency is achieved when market forces are allowed to operate freely."
For example, McClure said, "the United States produces 20 times that of the Soviet Union."
He defended modern agricultural techniques as necessary. "Organic agriculture was a satisfactory concept at about the time of Wellington and Napoleon," he told Patriquin, adding that there are too many people in the world today for that method to feed.
Copyright CANADIAN PRESS 1988
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