Diet for a Small Planet Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Diet for a Small Planet Twentieth Anniversary Edition Frances Moore Lapp6 Illustrations by Marika Hahn BAUANTINE BOOKS NEW YORK Part I11 Diet for a Small Planet Revisited America's Experimental Diet To EAT THE typical American diet is to participate in the biggest experiment in human nutrition ever conducted. And the guinea pigs aren't faring so well! With a higher percent of our GNP spent on medical care than in any other industrial country and after remarkable advances in the understanding and cure of disease, the life expectancy of a forty-year-old American male in 1980 was only about six years longer than that of his counterpart of 1900. Why haven't our wealth and scientific advances done more for our health? Medical authorities now believe that a big part of the answer lies in the new American diet-an untested diet of high fat, high sugar, low fiber, which is now linked to six of the ten leading causes of death. (See Figure 4.) The first two editions of this book are. full of nonmeat recipes, just as this one is. But in my discussion of nutrition I stuck to the protein debate because I wanted to demon- strate that we didn't need a lot of meat (or any, for that matter) to get the protein our bodies need. Now I think I missed the boat, for the Diet for a Small Planet message can't be limited to meat. At root its theme is, how can we choose a diet that the earth's resources can sustain and that 118 / Diet for a Small Planet Revisited America's Experimental Diet / 1 19 can best sustain our bodies? To answer that, I had to inves- tigate more than meat. As I looked at the radical change in the American diet, I was most struck by our soaring meat consumption. In my lifetime beef ccmsumption has doubled and poultry consumption has tripled. What I didn't adequately appreciate was how much our entire diet had been transformed. In the 1977 Dietary Goals for the United States, health authorities summing up information gathered by the Senate Se- lect Committee on Health and Nutrition concluded that Americans are eating significantly more fat, more sugar, and more salt, but less fiber and too many calories. No fewer than 16 expert health committees, national and inter- national, now agree that each of these changes is linked to heightened risk of disease.' Many other people are con- cerned that the food additives and pesticide residues we are ingesting may also pose health hazards. Most striking is that each of these health-threatening dietary changes is actually a byproduct of two underlying ones: more animal food, and more processed food. "Pro- cessed" simply means that between the ground and our mouths someone takes out certain things and puts in other things-and not always things that are good for us. The problem is not that Americans are adding more sugar and salt to their recipes or cooking with more fat; the problem is that these are being added for us. All we have to do is take the fatty, grain-fed steak from the meat counter, the potato chips from the shelf, or the Big Mac from its styro- foam package. Eat at Your Own Risk You'll notice that when scientists speak of diet and disease they are careful to say that such-and-such a way of eating affects the "risk" of getting a particular disease. That's because it is almost impossible to prove that diet causes a particular disease. For instance, you can't prove that your father's heart attack was caused by high blood pressure that was caused by his high salt diet. 120 / Diet for a Small Planet Revisited Scientists must largely rely on "guilt by association." By comparing populations, they can observe which diets are associated with which types of disease. But comparing different societies with different diets is less than convincing, since there is always the possibility that genetic differences among populations and other environmental factors play a decisive role. So the most telling observations are those of a single population group .which changes its diet. Here is a sampling of such evidence: .The traditional Japanese diet contains little animal fat and almost no dairy products. Japanese who migrate to the United States and shift to a typical American diet have a dramatically increased incidence of breast and colon can- cer.2 .The citizens of Denmark were forced to reduce their intake of animal foods by 30 percent during World War I, when their country was blockaded. Their death rate simul- taneously fell 30 percent, to its lowest level in 20 years." Denmark's experience was not unique: in a number of Eu- ropean countries, where World War I1 forced people to eat less fat and cholesterol and fewer calories, rates of heart disease fell. @Insome third world countries a small cIass of urbanites have adopted the new American diet over the last 20 years. Coronary heart disease now occurs more and more fre- quently in some of those countries, such as Sri Lanka, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines, the World Health Organization reports.4 Other important evidence comes from different diet and disease patterns in populations that are similar in most other ways. For example, a study of 24,000 Seventh Day Adven- tists living in California showed that the nonvegetarian Ad- ventists had a three times greater risk of heart disease than those eating a plant food diet.6 In her fascinating, thoroughly researched book Jack Sprat's Legacy (Richard Marek, 198 1 ) , Patricia Hausman convinced me that health authorities around the world vir- t tually all agree: the typical American diet is a high-risk diet. The "debate" over the risks associated with the new American diet is perpetuated by the media and vested in- I terests in the meat, dairy, and egg industries, who have Americds Experimental Diet / 121 spent millions of dollars trying to publicly deny these risks, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Eight Radical Changes in the U.S. Diet The food industry was quick to attack the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs for daring in 1977 to suggest a change in the American diet. How ironic. Never has a people's diet changed so much so fast as ours has over the last 80 years. And that change, as we shall see, has been in large part caused by the food industry it- self. I have looked at each of these changes and asked, what are the risks associated with this change? And why the change? (By the way, the best detailed source on the "Changing American Diet" is an excellent book by that name (1978) written by Letitia Brewster and Michael Ja- cobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.) I will discuss each change separately, but as nutritionist Dr. Joan Gussaw wisely observes, our bodies don't experience these changes separately. "One of the handicaps of most 'scientific' investigations of the impact of dietary change is that each is studied separately, whereas the greater threat may be their cumulative impact," says Dr. Gussow. So we have to look at the whole cluster. Dangerous Change No. 1: Protein from Animals Instead of Plants Contrary to what I thought, the dramatic change is not in our protein consumption. It has actually varied little over the last 65 years, fluctuating between 88 grams and 104 grams per person per day (roughly twice what our bodies can use). The change is in how our protein is pack- aged. Sixty-five years ago we got almost 40 percent of our protein from grain, bread, and other cereal products. Now 3. Protein Myths: A New Look HAVINGREAD OF the vast resources we squander to produce meat, you might easily conclude that meat must be indis- pensable to human well-being. But this just isn't the case. When I first wrote Diet for a Small Planet I was fighting two nutritional myths at once. First was the myth that we need scads of protein, the more the better. The second was that meat contains the best protein. Combined, these two myths have led millions of people to believe that only by eating lots of meat could they get enough protein. Protein Mythdogy Myth No. I: Meat contains more protein than my other food. Fact: Containing 20 to 25 percent protein by weight, meat ranks about in the middle of the protein quantity scale, along with some nuts, cheese, beans, and fish. (Check the "quantity" side of Figure 14, "The Food/ Protein Continuum.") Protein Myths: A New Look / 159 Myth No. 2: Eating lots of meat is the only way to get enough protein. Fact: Americans often eat 50 to 100 percent more protein than their bodies can use. Thus, most Americans could completely eliminate meat, fish, and poultry from their diets and still get the recommended daily allowance of protein from all the other protein-rich foods in the typical American diet. Myth No. 3: Meat is the sole source for certain essential vitamins and minerals. t Fact: Even in the current meat-centered American diet, nonmeat sources provide more than half of our intake of I each of the 1 1 most critical vitamins and minerals, except vitamin B12. And meat is not the sole source of B12; it is f also found in dairy products and eggs, and even more 0 abundantly in tempeh, a fermented soy food.

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