Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition
Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition Books
- ISBN13: 9780520254039
- Shape up: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics laid the groundwork for today’s food revolution and changed the way we answer to food industry marketing practices. Now, a new introduction and concluding chapter result in us up to date on the key events in that movement. This pathbreaking, prize-winning book helps us know more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.Amazon.com Review
In the U.S., we’re 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 nutritional choices to our detriment. Central to her argument is the American “paradox of bounty,” the recognition that our food abundance (we’ve enough calories to meet every citizen’s needs twice over) leads profit-fixated food producers to do everything possible to broaden their market part, thus influential 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, go more” thought that most nutritionists shout may possibly be heard.
Nestle, nutrition chair at New York University and editor of the 1988 General practitioner General Report, has served her time in the nutritional trenches and is ideally suited to revealing how government nutritional advice is watered down when a thought might threaten industry sales. (Her report on byzantine nutritional food-pyramid rewordings to avoid “eat less” recommendations is both predictable and surprising.) She has other “war tales,” too, that involve marketing to children in school (in the form of soft-drink “pouring rights” agreements, hallway advertising, and quick-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.” It’s a telling conclusion in an engrossing and masterfully panoramic exposé. –Arthur Boehm
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Weak-willed people will like “Food Politics” – shame on them. Marion Nestle, one of the foremost food nannies in this people, has produced a book that heaps the blame for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease on food producers, marketing executives, and even school principals. Everyone, it seems, is responsible for those like handles except for the very people who are carrying them nearly.
In Ms. Nestle’s world, there is no willpower, common sense, or private responsibility. Most hefty people are simply passive “victims” of industry. She writes: “I have become increasingly convinced that many of the nutritional problems of Americans — not least of them obesity — can be traced to the food industry’s imperative to encourage people to eat more in order to generate sales and increase income in a highly competitive marketplace.” Excuse me? Ad campaigns and super-size restaurant specials may “encourage” me to eat but they don’t compel me. That’s because, like most people, I belong to the “a-small-of-what-you-fancy-does-you-excellent” school of eating. There is no Orwellian plot to hook us on certain foods and drinks from cradle to nursing home.
Ms. Nestle’s book reminds me of her real agenda: the promotion of a “stout tax” or “Twinkie tax” on food and drinks, which in moderation and as part of a balanced diet, add fun to everyday life. This policy may possibly really work hostile to the objectives of the food nannies. The aim would be to discourage consumers from buying certain products, yet this “sin tax” may possibly make the goods more alluring to shoppers who are looking for a small indulgence. Of course, the largest reason to oppose Ms. Nestle’s hidden agenda is that consumers don’t need another tax, thank you very much. This nagging book misses the mark. Eat, exercise, be pleased.
Rating: 1 / 5
Individuals incapable of thought for themselves will truly appreciate, Marion Nestle’s book – Food Politics. The author, a professor and of the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University puts much of the blame for the nation’s consequence problem on the food industry. Has she ever heard of private responsibility, exercise, and apt dieting?
Nestle takes a specific aim at the impact on children and claims that the “food industry targets children and converts schools into vehicles for selling junk foods that are high in calories but low in nutritional value. Clever and slick marketing strategies target consumers from the cradle onward.” She refuses to acknowledge some key facts. Obesity in children is caused in part, to the lack of exercise. Urban and other limited budget school districts across the people continue to reduce daily corporal education programs, football, and other extra-curricular activities. Moreover, the lure of computer games and twenty-four hour cable programs have children sitting still for hours throughout the day.
Nestle’s book only makes the kind of hysteria caused by our litigious society. The General practitioner’s General’s recent explanation declaring that obesity is a major health problem has greedy trial lawyers considering filing lawsuits hostile to food and beverage companies. This whiny book only helps them “fuel the fire” and reaches their goals.
Rating: 1 / 5
Marion Nestle’s book “Food Politics” makes clear that the political system she preferential treatment is dictatorship – with her in command. Marion is just so much smarter than us all, and so much more virtuous, and so much more in self-control, that she can be the meal planner for the world. If you disagree with anything she says, you’re hefty, undereducated and stupid.
The author’s motto may possibly be “if it tastes excellent don’t eat it.” She rails hostile to foods we’ve all grown up with and delight in, and wants to make us feel like terrible parents if we let our kids have any of these foods. Should we eat like pigs? Of course not. Should people who are obese have stricter diets than the rest of us? Absolutely. But there’s no need for everyone, regardless of their consequence and their health, to deny themselves moderate amounts of enjoyable foods. We’d all be better off is we got up off our rear ends and spent less time in front of the TV and playing video games, and more time engaging in sports and exercise to burn up excess calories and build stronger, healthier bodies.
Rating: 1 / 5
It’s a piece of cake for Prof. Nestle. The food industry is the only reason why people are hefty and obese. It is only their greed and unscrupulousness that turned us into “Couch-Potatoes”.
This narrow-minded approach is fascinating for a scientist. All scientific areas, which deal with the come forth of obesity, agree that obesity is a multifactorial problem. Of course, everything we eat does play an vital role, but there are many other factors which also have a significant impact. One of the most prominent ones is the increasing lack of corporal activity that influences the equation energy intake minus energy expenditure – even with constant intake – negatively.
The methods of resolution in this book – if one can find any – are much too small-sighted and do not take other lifestyle factors into consideration, let lonely the private responsibility all of us need to show. But the latter seems to be a specific US trait…
In small: long tales, small essence, not plotting through.
Rating: 1 / 5
Judging from the other “reviews” of this book, it’s evident that the mere existence of this book strikes a chord in those “conspiracy-theory”, “huge-business-is-out-to-get-us”, “someone-needs-to-protect-us” Naderite-types.
Is anyone really surprised that the food business is really a BUSINESS? And that the nature of businesses is to promote their own self-interests, advertise to the end-user, and yield products that the end user wants to buy?
I take exception to the premise that our choices are controlled by the food business. The reality is that our choices are controlling the food industry! Changes in our buying patterns – and that lonely – will result in changes in the food industry. Doubt it? Look at the burgeoning organic food industry (yes, it’s a business, too!).
The implication of several other reviewers is that in some way the food industry needs to be regulated into doing for us what we don’t seem capable of ourselves – making responsible individual choices. This, of course, would place us with no choice, except those “choices” deemed apt by “Huge Brother”. (Socialism vs. Democracy/Free Enterprise)
The responsibility for starving children lies not with the food industry, but with governments, churches, and individuals – with emphasis on the individual. The sole responsibility of any business is to – within the law – yield income (earn a living) for its owners and employees.
Whether or not you agree, I’m sure we can all agree that it is incumbent upon both businesses and individuals to behave in a socially responsible manner. I’m sure the author has found ample evidence that not all businesses in the food industry have done so. That acknowledged, I contend that it’s incorrect to paint an entire industry with such a broad stroke of a brush dipped in muck.
Rating: 1 / 5