Food Politics: How the Food Industry
Influences Nutrition and Health
(California Studies in Food and
Culture, 3) by Marion Nestle
An Academic Yet Engrossing Exposé
In the U.S., were bombarded with nutritional advice--the work, we assume,
of reliable authorities with our best interests at heart. Far from it, says
Marion Nestle, whose Food Politics absorbingly details how the food
industry--through lobbying, advertising, and the co-opting of experts--
influences our dietary choices to our detriment. Central to her argument is
the American paradox of plenty, the recognition that our food abundance
(weve enough calories to meet every citizens needs twice over) leads
profit-fixated food producers to do everything possible to broaden their
market portion, thus swaying us to eat more when we should do the
opposite. The result is compromised health: epidemic obesity to start, and
increased vulnerability to heart and lung disease, cancer, and stroke--
reversible if the constantly suppressed eat less, move more message that

most nutritionists shout could be heard. Nestle, nutrition chair at New
York University and editor of the 1988 Surgeon General Report, has
served her time in the dietary trenches and is ideally suited to revealing
how government nutritional advice is watered down when a message
might threaten industry sales. (Her report on byzantine nutritional food-
pyramid rewordings to avoid eat less recommendations is both predictable
and astonishing.) She has other war stories, too, that involve marketing to
children in school (in the form of soft-drink pouring rights agreements,
hallway advertising, and fast-food coupon giveaways), and diet-
supplement dramas in which manufacturers and the government enter
regulation frays, with the industry championing free choice even as that
position counters consumer protection. Is there hope? If we want to
encourage people to eat better diets, says Nestle, we need to target
societal means to counter food industry lobbying and marketing practices
as well as the education of individuals. Its a telling conclusion in an
engrossing and masterfully panoramic exposé. --Arthur Boehm
Personal Review: Food Politics: How the Food Industry
Influences Nutrition and Health (California Studies in Food and
Culture, 3) by Marion Nestle
I plowed my way through this book across many late-nights at my favorite
24/7 coffee bar, easily ignoring all of the "local atmosphere."
If you can handle heavy academic reading, this book is practically a
Woodward & Bernstein thriller -- an extremely engrossing exposé
concerning the VERY ugly political underbelly of the American food
industry, and how it chugs away to keep all of us as confused as possible
about our food choices and what honestly constitutes sound nutritional
guidance.
If you're boggled by choices that SHOULD be simple, such as trying to
figure out whether it's healthier to eat butter or some chemical facsimile
which includes ingredients you couldn't pronounce to save your
grandmother's soul, the spotlight on politics in this book will salve your
frazzled mind. The decades of political insanity and posturing surrounding
something so seemingly simple as [what food pyramid version is permitted
in schools] says so much about the ENTIRE industry. Don't feel badly if
you're a bit confused about "good nutrition," because you are NOT alone.
Scores of millions of Americans feel the EXACT same way ... and Big
Food likes it that way!
Nestle's writing does indeed get rather heady in some sections; however,
she's challenging decades of contradiction, confusion, obfuscation, and
outright lies that Big Food has tried to sell to America, so it really is
necessary for her to preemptively buttress herself against anticipated
challenges from Big Food and their seemingly-endless supply of lawyers
and lobbyists. Ignore the negative reviews.

If heady, heavily-cited reading is NOT your thing, feel free to check out the
[similar reading] suggestions, because there will probably arrive some
point (or several) at which you REALLY want to throw this book at the wall.
Just an honest observation.
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