Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [67]
Eight Radical Changes in the U.S. Diet
The food industry was quick to attack the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs for daring in 1977 to suggest a change in the American diet. How ironic. Never has a people’s diet changed so much so fast as ours has over the last 80 years. And that change, as we shall see, has been in large part caused by the food industry itself.
I have looked at each of these changes and asked, what are the risks associated with this change? And why the change? (By the way, the best detailed source on the “Changing American Diet” is an excellent book by that name (1978) written by Letitia Brewster and Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.)
I will discuss each change separately, but as nutritionist Dr. Joan Gussow wisely observes, our bodies don’t experience these changes separately. “One of the handicaps of most ‘scientific’ investigations of the impact of dietary change is that each is studied separately, whereas the greater threat may be their cumulative impact,” says Dr. Gussow. So we have to look at the whole cluster.
Dangerous Change No. 1: Protein from Animals Instead of Plants
Contrary to what I thought, the dramatic change is not in our protein consumption. It has actually varied little over the last 65 years, fluctuating between 88 grams and 104 grams per person per day (roughly twice what our bodies can use). The change is in how our protein is packaged. Sixty-five years ago we got almost 40 percent of our protein from grain, bread, and other cereal products. Now we only get 17 percent of our protein from these sources. In their place, animal products, which then supplied about half of our protein, now contribute two-thirds.6
U.S. consumption of animal products began to climb after World War II, with beef consumption almost doubling and poultry consumption almost tripling by the late 1970s.7
THE RISKS
There is no medical consensus about the risks of diets high in protein generally or about diets high in animal protein specifically. (There is general agreement about the risks of what results from this new “packaging” of our protein—more fat and less fiber. But I’ll deal with those risks later.) While no consensus exists, there are some intriguing warning signals.
The Senate Select Committee notes: “One series of investigations found that diets that derive their protein from animal sources elevate plasma cholesterol levels to a much greater extent than do diets that derive their protein from vegetable sources. Another line of basic research demonstrated that, in almost all cases, high protein diets are more atherosclerotic than are low protein diets.”8 (Atherosclerosis is a hardening of the arteries caused by fatty deposits accumulating along the artery walls.)
High-protein diets have also been linked to osteoporosis, the thinning of the skeleton, in some studies. Osteoporosis, which now affects four out of five elderly American women, occurs when calcium is drawn from the bones, weakening them. Pain, fractures, and even the collapse of part of the vertebrae can result. Because more calcium is excreted in the urine in a high-protein diet, this kind of diet may promote osteoporosis. (Apparently, eating more calcium doesn’t help.) One recent investigation found that animal protein did contribute to increased calcium excretion. But there is still much that’s not understood.9
Dangerous Change No. 2: More Fat
Americans eat 27 percent more fat than did our grandparents in the early 1900s. And more than one-third of that increase has come just in the last ten years. As a result, fat’s contribution to our total calorie intake