Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [66]
Figure 4. Impact of the Experimental American Diet
As I looked at the radical change in the American diet, I was most struck by our soaring meat consumption. In my lifetime beef consumption 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 Select 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 international, now agree that each of these changes is linked to heightened risk of disease.1 Many other people are concerned 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. “Processed” 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 styrofoam 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.
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 cancer.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 simultaneously fell 30 percent, to its lowest level in 20 years.3 Denmark’s experience was not unique: in a number of European countries, where World War II forced people to eat less fat and cholesterol and fewer calories, rates of heart disease fell.
• In some third world countries a small class of urbanites have adopted the new American diet over the last 20 years. Coronary heart disease now occurs more and more frequently 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 Adventists living in California showed that the nonvegetarian Adventists had a three times greater risk of heart disease than those eating a plant food diet.5
In her fascinating, thoroughly researched book Jack Sprat’s Legacy (Richard Marek, 1981), Patricia