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Marion Nestle Interview: What To Eat
By Malcolm Jolley
If you Google Marion Nestle it becomes pretty clear, pretty quickly, that her
reputation as the world's most respected nutritionist is well founded. I had the
privilege of ferrying her around Toronto recently and got to talk to her about
her instant classic: What To Eat.
Gremolata: I really enjoyed this book.
And one of the things I really liked is that, at times, it's actually quite
funny. There'd be a few lines, often at the end of a chapter, that would make me
chuckle.
Marion Nestle: Well it was so much fun to do, this book. I mean
look what I just found here! [Reaches into her Dominion shopping bag and brings
out a box of honey nut flavoured cereal.] Here's an American sugar-coated
cereal, right?
Gremolata: Right...
Marion Nestle: And it's got a
checkmark from the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation. So we go and look at
the small print - this is exactly the way I wrote this book - so it says in
print, that's very hard to read, "Cheerios financially supports the Heart Check
Education Program of the Heart and Stroke Foundation. This is not an
endorsement."
Gremolata: [Chuckles.] Right.
Marion Nestle: It's
not an endorsement! But just think! What would someone assume from the box?
[Pulls out a box of cookies.] And this one, it has a Canadian Breast Cancer
Foundation seal. Now, it says they're low saturated fats, they're low in
trans-fats and they're a source of calcium and they're endorsed by the Canadian
Breast Cancer Foundation. So I guess you can eat these cookies to prevent breast
cancer. Wow! This is the best way of preventing breast cancer I've ever heard
of: eat cookies!
Gremolata: This book came out of the lecture tour based
on your last book, Food Politics, where the number one question people would ask
you was "what do you eat?"
Marion Nestle: Yeah, everyone was very
interested in what I ate. Which was very surprising, I mean I thought, who
cares? But they were really interested and since I'm a big eater and love food,
I thought, Well OK, I guess I can talk about that.
Gremolata: It seems to
me that the sensibility in What To Eat is commonsensical. More fruits and
vegetables; all the things that you'd think everybody already
knows.
Marion Nestle: Ho ho! Really?
Gremolata: OK, maybe not. So
then why are we always looking for a silver bullet? Something that's going to
cure everything?
Marion Nestle: The entire world of food marketing is set
up to get people to believe in a silver bullet. There's a book coming out from
Cornell professor, Brian Wansink, called Mindless Eating. It's a review of his
research on environmental triggers to eating. It's very powerful research. It
shows - this is the easy one - that if you give people really large portions of
food they'll eat far more calories than if you give them smaller portions. You
can also do that with containers, and you can do that with the shapes of
glasses. He also shows it with location. He has a famous jelly bean experiment.
If you put bowls of jelly beans at different locations from where people are
sitting, there's a direct proportion between how close to the bowls they are
sitting and how much they eat. These are things that you can be completely
unaware of - it's totally unconscious. And yet food marketers know about them
because they've done the research. This is the first time someone's done this
research that wasn't being paid by a food company, where the results are kept
proprietary.
Gremolata: Every chapter of What To Eat has a citing of at
least one think tank, foundation or research institute of some kind that's paid
for by the food companies. They seem to have all the resources.
Marion
Nestle: If you are a mere consumer in this environment, you are being subjected
to deliberate efforts to get you to eat more unconsciously - so that you're not
aware of it. This is happening all the time and they're so good at it that
nobody notices. I mean there all of these comments about the way that society
has changed over the last 20 years with parallel rising rates of overeating and
obesity. And it makes me want to ask a series of questions. Like, when did it
become OK to eat in bookstores? Anybody my age remembers when you would never do
that!
I went to NYU in 1988 and there was a big sign over the entrance to
the library: "No food allowed." Now, there's a cafe in the library. There is
food available in business supply stores - even clothing stores! In department
stores like Macy's: in San Francisco there were candy bars at the cash register.
These are environmental triggers for eating more that people are completely
unaware of. A vending machine is an environmental trigger. There's research that
shows the more vending machines you have, the more people will buy out of
them.
Gremolata: That reminds me of the passage in the book where you go
to the Google company headquarters. They want your nutritional advice, so you go
and they have this wonderful cafeteria with good fresh food, but when you go to
the offices there are all these snack dispensers full of junk!
Marion
Nestle: My prediction, now that Google is publicly traded, is that as it becomes
a mature company it will also be a fatter company. Right now, nobody's fat
because they're all about 14 years old and their chosen means of transportation
is the bicycle, which requires some calories.
Gremolata: Is this a class
issue?
Marion Nestle: Oh, sure. Absolutely. At least in the States. Poor
people are much fatter and have fewer opportunities for being active and eating
well. There's no question that there are huge areas in the cities and in rural
areas where people just don't have access to decent food.
Gremolata: It's
ironic that you're more likely to have access to farmers' markets, CSA and
organic small production produce in the city than the country.
Marion
Nestle: And in North America there are areas where there isn't anything for
hundreds of miles.
Gremolata: Well, at least maybe they're fishing for
their dinner.
Marion Nestle: You hope. But there are terrible problems
with overweight...
Gremolata: And diabetes, especially in native
populations.
Marion Nestle: That's a direct result of
overweight.
Gremolata: That reminds me of the part of the book where you
talk about all the fad diets. And your explanation of why people lose weight in
the first few weeks of the Atkins was as clear as I've read: they're just losing
water. But the one diet you seem to have a grudging respect for is the
GI.
Marion Nestle: I like "grudging". That nails it. I think there might
be something to it, though I don't think [the glycemic index] is as important as
its proponents want us to believe. The glycemic index has been proposed as the
solution to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and all kinds of other
diseases. I think that's over-hyped. But the idea that you shouldn't be eating
foods that have a lot of refined carbohydrates makes a lot of sense to
me.
I must say, I sat in on a session of David Ludwig's Pediatric Obesity
Clinic [in Boston]. He's one of the proponents of the glycemic index and I
watched him counsel a young overweight child and her mother. I was very
impressed with his ability to explain the concept to that child and then have
the child circle on her diet record all the foods that have high a glycemic
index rating. The kid could do it just like that. It was also very powerful to
see that 90% of what she was eating was in the high GI category. So if it's a
way to do that, then it seemed to me to be very useful.
Gremolata: But
how bizarre that a child would have to create a record of what they
eat.
Marion Nestle: If you saw what that child was eating, you would
understand why that would be useful. I mean, you just have no idea how people
eat. This girl's diet was junk food; carbohydrate junk food because her mother
believed that "fat" was poison. So there wasn't a reasonable balance of foods
containing protein, fat and carbohydrates. It was quite shocking.
So, if
people fill their houses with processed foods from the centre of the supermarket
aisles and they don't know how to cook or what to do with a vegetable, fruits
and vegetables being a prime indicator of a healthy dietary pattern...well. If
people do not understand what they should eat - and people tell me that they do
not understand, then you see why there are large swaths of the population that
are overweight. When I stop at a fast food place on the highway, it becomes very
clear that there are a lot of people who are eating very differently from
me.
Gremolata: I loved the statistic you included about the top three
vegetables sold in the United States.
Marion Nestle: Right: potatoes for
French fries, tomatoes for ketchup and iceberg lettuce for
hamburgers.
Gremolata: My two year old son loves ketchup and this reminds
me of the nightly fight we have with him to try and get him to eat a vegetable
other than ketchup. How do you get kids to eat well? How do I get him to eat his
broccoli?
Marion Nestle: I think you start with good broccoli, first of
all, which might not be so easy to get. Then, you just keep at it. Just keep at
it. The research shows that sometimes it takes 10 or 20 times to introduce a new
food to a child. But you do it and you eat good food yourselves and sit down
with them for dinner. If you want your kids to eat healthfully, then you have to
eat healthfully too.
You know, I've seen schools that have changed their
lunches from fast foods to what I call "adult food": from "kids' food" to adult
food. Part of food marketing is to convince us that kids have to have their own
food.
Gremolata: "Just for kids".
Marion Nestle: Right. And when
I've seen schools that have made those changes it's astonishing. The kids will
eat healthy food and they like it. And they'll be critical about what they eat
in a very sophisticated way.
Gremolata: You've been living in Berkeley,
is this Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard?
Marion Nestle: Yeah, I've seen
Alice Waters' project, which is so touching and moving that it brings tears to
your eyes. It's just amazing to look at. But I've also seen schools in public
schools in New York where they've brought in a chef and a team to try and
improve the quality of the meals. I went to one of the poorest schools in
Brooklyn, in a tough area of Bushwick. It's mostly black with some Hispanic. And
I saw teenage boys eating salad - enjoying salad.
Gremolata:
Victory!
Marion Nestle: Victory. It can be done. The principal and people
from the school worked with the administrators to get those kids away from
eating junk food and they did some very clever things to do it. They gave the
kids choices, like having a salad bar. On the day I was there they had an
enormous fruit salad of all kinds of cut up fruits that looked absolutely
delicious and it was gone in a minute!
But it's tough. You have a two
year old?
Gremolata: Two and a half.
Marion Nestle: OK. Well he
could already be brainwashed. Even if you don't have a TV in the house and
you're pretty restrictive about what he can and cannot eat, your kid already
knows about McDonald's.
Gremolata: Well, we try to be very protective,
but he does love French fries.
Marion Nestle: Sure. Of course. They're
delicious. Everyone loves French fries and should have them...once and a
while
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