Redefining Food: A Radical Proposal to Reduce Obesity
March 3rd, 2008 by Kavan WolfeEvery time I visit the United States I am reminded of just how massive the obesity problem is. It’s time to start getting creative about addressing this issue. One problem, believe it or not, is that people don’t seem to know which foods are bad for them. Here’s a radical idea: how about we try restricting the definition of food, to, you know, things that are good to eat.
Now you may think that “food” comprises anything that some idiot dares to swallow. Considering that this dude who ate a plane, I suggest that defining food as anything anyone eats is pragmatically untenable.
I suppose you may be thinking that this is silly because lightbulbs and screws are indigestible, and therefore clearly not food. Well, cellulose walls make celery and corn kernels indigestible as well, but aren’t they still food? Those packets of silica that are put in boxes to absorb order say “do not eat” won’t actually kill you if you eat them, but that doesn’t make them a food! If a eating too much of a mushroom will poison you, we say it’s not a food, but eating too much nutmeg will fuck you up just as bad, and that’s still called a food.
What if we ditch digestibility as the basis for calling something a food? Is aspartame really a food? Yes, the body can metabolize it, but it is devoid of nutrition. The same goes for white sugar and white flour, both “nutritionless monstrosities” that contribute to diabetes and degenerative diseases.
Suppose, instead, that we defined food as any substance that is a significant source of nutrition (i.e., vitamins and minerals) when digested by a typical human. We can further define a junk food as a food that has an unbalanced proportion of fat or simple carbohydrates, or a large amount of a harmful substance, such as salt, alcohol or nitrates.
The astute reader will quickly recognize how this will shake up the junk food industry. Much of what is currently called junk food is here reclassified as non-food. Most candies, some chocolate bars, kool-aid, oreos, white bread, instant white rice and iceberg lettuce are non-foods. Natural ice cream, steak, ground beef and beer are junk foods. Brown rice, whole wheat bread, kiwis, salmon and spinach are foods.
Finally, let’s take this one step further, and make purveyors of non-foods print “non-food” in big letters on the packages of their offerings. Junk food should be suitably marked. In fact, I would go so far as to relegate non-foods to different aisles than real foods.
What I’m trying to say that putting Tang next to orange juice, hot dogs next to chicken breasts and whole wheat bread next to white bread is confusing, because it suggests that these things are somehow similar. They’re not. Tang is not a fruit juice, hot dogs are not meat, and white bread is not even a food, if we look at its nutritional content. Separating real foods from junk foods and non-foods might drive home the message of what’s OK to eat.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to choose what they eat; I’m saying that society should make it easy for people to make informed choices. Restricting the definition of food is an easy way to help people who don’t have the time (or sometimes the intelligence) to learn about proper nutrition. Of course, the definitions I’ve proposed are quite general, and need to be applied intelligently, but we have to start somewhere.
Although we won’t know for sure until we try it, I suspect that marking many common supermarket items, “NOT A FOOD” will have a strong psychological effect on potential buyers. The junk food lobby will surely rally against this but… well… fuck ‘em. Hershey and Cadbury are not going to pay for your quadruple bypass, are they?
March 4th, 2008 at 7:50 am
This is what got Americans in trouble in the first place. We dumb down the information too much. Hand feed the info rather than train the mind to seek it out. Americans should learn to read a bit more. I also hate hearing about a new law/policy that controls the information we recieve. Or tells us what’s good for us and how much we should have of it. Government should be left out and we should learn to figure it out on our own or die because of it (Darwin anyone?).
One funny story is how my nanny always tells us our daughter has had juice and we promptly tell her it’s only 10% juice and she looks at us dumbfounded. Even with the real juice content right on the box she still can’t figure out the difference between 100% juice and 10% juice. I’m now just giving her our homemade fruit and veggie juices.
. . . I guess we should print this stuff on the front in big bold letters otherwise Americans just won’t get it.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:59 am
You’re finally talking some sense now!
Your last paragraph is absolutely right. Nothing will ever change. The junk food, chemical, pharmaceutical, tobacco, alcohol, companies have way too much control over Washington.
No corporation or government truly cares about your health. Period.
People will keep paying for the junk food, get sick from the junk food and all the chemicals in the environment, and then buy a lifetime worth of pharma drugs to manage the disease. Then they will die just after retirement age to reduce the amount of money the government has to give back to through SS. All the right people get their money. Everything is kosher.
Welcome to America!
March 12th, 2008 at 6:42 am
Are you secretly this guy: http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/1594201455/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205332892&sr=1-1 ?
Anyway, yep, been saying it for years. What pissed me off a lot when I came here was the ‘juice drinks’ (ingredients: water, sugars, flavouring, and maybe a little actual fruit) - they apparently can’t be labeled as juice, because that’s not what they are, but they get put next to real juice. now though, I’m thinking that, as you said, this sort of thing should be expanded: processed meats could be meat-like edible products, or something.
March 12th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
@Ben
Helping people read more and stay educated is part of a long term solution. My suggestion is more of a quick fix, though I think it would still be helpful for a more educated society in that it promotes cognitive economy. The idea of government staying out of it in the hopes that Darwinian evolution will take care of the problem is unlikely to work when intelligence and education are inversely correlated with birth rates.
@H
Good points. This is one of the reasons I don’t live in the US.
@Mich
Nope, I’m not that guy. I’ve only written one book, and it’s not going to be on the bestseller list anytime soon. Yes, the mislabeling of sugar water as juice is probably contributing to diabetes rates. Unfortunately, I don’t think congress understands this sort of semantic distinction.
March 16th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
My approach to address this problem would be an “unhealthy food tax”, which should be slapped onto anything with lots of saturated fats, trans fats, sugar, sodium, etc., proportionally to the “badness” of the food. If your average fast food burger with fries suddenly cost 10 instead of 5 bucks and coke were suddenly more expensive than real orange juice, then people might end up making better chocies. And some people (like me) would still occassionaly reach for the then $15 Chocolate Extreme Blizzard :-), aware of the costs that this in the long run causes for the health system if done repeatedly.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:51 am
@Michael
I like this, but then I wonder whether it wouldn’t make junk food more desirable because it’s ‘worth’ more. Then again, the number of people unable to afford lots of junk food would probably outweigh the number of people splurging on fancy dinners at the newly expensive McDonald’s, so maybe it’d be worth it anyway.
March 19th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
@Michael and Mich
You both make good points. I think a more general principle here is that the cost of an item should reflect not only the cost of producing the item, but also the costs to society of consuming that item. From this perspective, junk food, cigarettes and gasoline are generally underpriced and Organic foods, bicycles and bus passes are generally overpriced.
March 30th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I like the idea, but I think nutritional science is too full of holes (and corruption) to pin down which foods are really the worst. We all know processing food ruins it, white flour and sugar being particularly bad, refined salt, and so on. I don’t necessarily agree on the saturated fats part, it’s a little muddy considering how little un-screwed-up food people actually eat.
We all keep hearing about how heart disease and diabetes, cancer, … rates are going up. Well the obvious question is what has changed? Surely the simplest way to undo the damage is just to reverse the changes? Turn diet back 250 years and remove sugar and that’s probably quite good (unless unhealthy populations are used).
March 30th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I guess it would not necessary to exactly determine how bad a paticular piece of food is. Instead, it should be sufficient to fight the really bad ones (Pop drinks- excessive sugar, fast food- excessive fat, sodium, etc.). There will always borderline cases, which should probably just be left alone.
Turning back the diet 250 years sounds good- however, keep in mind that you would also eliminate many good things such as tropical fruit. Also, winters used to be times of limited fruit, veggies etc. Note- people did not live very long back then, e.g. because of limited medical care, so the comparison is kind of hard…
The elimination or strong reduction of refined sugar is certainly not wrong, although I’ve seen studies that found the strongest correlation between waist size and diabetes, not sugar intake and diabetes. Also, excessive sodium in Canada (and trust me- many foods still taste salty for me, after living here for almost two years (I’m from Germany)) seems to be the single biggest nutritional problem, believe it or not.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:01 am
@James, why do you think nutritional science is corrupt?
@Michael, good points. I hadn’t noticed that Canadian food was salty, on the West Coast at least.
April 6th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
This is a brilliant, brilliant idea and would hit home for lots of people. Still, the bigger issue are corporations and their psychopathic pursuit of profit with a complete disregard for their negative impact on society, the environment and humans. In our current state, corporations will never let this logical system fly, but if we were to reduce the power of corporations and return power to actual human beings, perhaps this system could get implemented.