Healthcare vs. Processed Food Industry

It's time for a food fight.

For years we've talked about the physical, emotional, spiritual and financial effects of overweight and obesity on our society.

This month, for example, the American Diabetes Association issued a report which estimated that the nearly 22.3 million Americans who are diagnosed with diabetes cost $245 billion in medical care and lost productivity in 2012. That represents a 41% increase from the $174 billion estimate in 2007.

The report blames the increased costs on the additional five million American adults and children who were diagnosed with diabetes in the five years since the last estimate was released, a 27% increase from the 17.5 million diagnosed cases in 2007. Another 79 million Americans now have pre-diabetes, which puts them at risk for developing Type 2 diabetes. Keep in mind that the report does not factor the millions of people who have diabetes or pre-diabetes but who have not been diagnosed.

Just as the ADA was issuing its report, The New York Times published a disturbing investigative report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Moss entitled The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food. The lengthy piece is adapted from Moss' book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which will be published this month.

Moss details how the processed food industry has hooked Americans on an unhealthy diet of fat, salt and sugar. His reporting is hardly a left-wing screed. In fact, given what he has uncovered, Moss can be annoyingly deferential to some of the more than 300 processed food industry executives and scientists he interviewed—people in positions of knowledge and power who put corporate profits above the health of the nation.

Not surprisingly, what Moss finds is that processed food giants such as Kraft, General Mills, and Coca-Cola are motivated by money. The more sugar, salt, and fat-laden junk foods they get us to shove down our pie holes, the more money they make. It really is just that simple.

In so many respects, especially in their marketing to children, the processed food industry has taken a page from Big Tobacco's playbook. These companies are frighteningly good at what they do. Moss writes about the armies of food scientists and engineers finding the "sensory-specific satiety" or "bliss point" that prompts consumers to eat an entire bag of potato chips.

Moss writes: "The biggest hits—be they Coca-Cola or Doritos—owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don't have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating."

To find the "bliss point" of vanilla- and cherry-flavored versions of Dr. Pepper, for example, Moss wrote that Cadbury Schweppes created 61 distinct formulas and conducted 3,904 tastings in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The final 135-page report talked about things like "mouth feel" and other sensations that would determine the success or failure of the soda.

If you're an advocate for wellness, this is what you are up against.

In this corner, we have overworked physicians, nutritionists, and other providers who might consult with patients a handful of times each year and scrawl out diet plans or exercise regimens as part of some vaguely defined wellness initiative.

In the far corner, we have a processed food industry which spends millions of dollars to bombard us every hour of every day with advertising urging us into supermarkets to buy their foods of dubious nutritional value.

This would be a laughable mismatch if it weren't for the fact that millions of people are suffering and dying as a result of this calculated effort to hook them on food that is not good for them.

Even in the face of these overwhelming odds, healthcare providers should not despair. Just as the processed food industry had borrowed tactics used by Big Tobacco, so too can physicians and other health advocates use the highly successful tactics of the anti-smoking movement to press for change.

Corporations that put profits above the public good respond to two base stimuli: fear and greed. Healthcare providers can hit both of those bliss points by using their collective status as trusted advocates for the public good to clearly blame and aggressively pressure the processed food industry for its role in nation's overweight and obesity epidemic.

Already we are seeing some movement. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, has gotten a lot of coverage for his efforts to ban super-sized sugary drinks as a public health menace. His efforts may get derailed in the courts, but the publicity he has generated is worth it. Consciousness has been raised. People are asking questions and that is a good start.

The sad truth is that wellness movements by themselves aren't enough to reverse the obesity and overweight epidemic, no matter how well-intentioned or proactive. They will fail unless we address the larger issue of what people eat. The processed food industry must be held accountable and pressured to modify the addictive junk it peddles to the American people.

Healthcare providers, the people who see first-hand the devastating effects of overweight and obesity, must lead this fight.