Money for Nothing — POP Agriculture

Have you ever noticed some food brands advertise they have, well…nothing? No GMOs, gluten, fat, sugar, oils, and the list goes on! Steve dives into how we pay “money for nothing” based on marketing claims for what’s in, or not in, our food.

Do you remember the great 1985 rock song by Dire Straits: “Money For Nothing?” They were celebrating that they could make a great living just by performing rock and roll music. I guess before that, they had been in the appliance repair business and their new lifestyle was so much easier and lucrative. The classic line is: “that ain’t workin, that’s the way you do it, your money for nothing and your chicks for free.” (That last part is kind of misogynistic by modern standards).

If you are on the receiving end of a “money for nothing” transaction, it’s great. But what if you are on the other side – the one who pays money but gets nothing? That doesn’t sound so cool and I can’t think of a popular song promoting being that kind of “sucker.”

But here is what is really bizarre if you step back and think about it. We who live in the privileged, modern, “rich world” have been duped into spending a lot of “money for nothing” when it comes to our food. Go walk the aisles of your local grocery store and see how many products are being marketed for what they are not. Fat Free, Sugar Free, Gluten Free, Non-GMO, Cage Free, Antibiotic-free, Hormone-free, and on and on. I recently did a survey of my local store planning to take pictures of all the labels like that and ran out of storage space on my phone!

A small sampling of the "money for nothing" options at my local grocery store.

On today’s episode of POPagriculture I want to explore this absurdity which I like to call: “The Marketing of Non-Existence.”

For millennia, people have often struggled to have sufficient food and sadly, based on a 2018 report from the World Health Organization, there are still around 821 million people in our world that are hungry . These fellow humans just need food for “what it is” and I think they would be nauseated to know that we buy our food for what it’s not. Even the privileged need our food to be “what it is” to provide us energy, vitamins, minerals, fiber and all sorts of health-promoting compounds (if only we would eat the amounts of fruits and vegetables most health experts advise). I recently went to pick up a few things at a Ralphs supermarket and I could not find a cart without a placard on it that said, “Simple truth, proud of what’s not in our food.” Of course, they mean pesticide residues, GMOs, anything that might help farmers to feed them. I will never shop at that store again, as with my previous decision never to shop at Whole Foods.

The sign in every shopping cart at my local Ralph’s Grocery Store.

So, how did this whole “money for nothing” for food start? Why are we constantly advertising food for what it is not? I have to sadly say, as a scientist, that this phenomenon was started by scientists who got things wrong. They were epidemiologists in the 1960s looking at data about lifestyles and heart disease, and they concluded that the typical American diet that was high in saturated fats and cholesterol, was why heart attack rates were so high in our country. It later turned out that if they had included more of the available dietary data by nationality, they might not have reached that conclusion.

Of course, this idea of a high fat diet causing heart attacks made intuitive sense. Arteries get clogged with fat and heavier people have greater risk, so avoiding fat seemed logical. The history of this is interesting and complex. In the late 1960s, as processed foods became a larger part of the American diet, there was pressure to institute some kind of regulation about what nutrient claims could be made and what ingredient listings should be required. The belief was that claims should be regulated under existing FDA rules and that ingredient information should be voluntary. By 1973, manufactured foods had to show a comparison of their vitamin and mineral content to “Recommended Daily Allowances,” or RDAs, while disclosing things like fat content and type remained voluntary. Several important reports emerged from the Surgeon General making connections between diet and health, increasing pressure from consumers to get information about what was in their foods. Food manufacturers anxious to seize on this interest began to make various claims, often to do with fat content but not so much about the total sugar content or its source. By 1990, Congress stepped in and passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, empowering the FDA to develop detailed rules, and through the early 90s there were a number of rule-making activities. The 1990 act was supposed to include funding for nutrition education so people could properly evaluate the new required data label on the back of the package. That educational funding never materialized, so consumers were much more likely to be influenced by the “front of the package” claims like “Low Fat”, “Zero Cholesterol,” etc.

This labeling requirement drove changes on the part of food manufacturers who started avoiding animal-sourced fats, like beef tallow, and substituting them with vegetable oils. Unfortunately, the most abundant vegetable oil in the U.S. came from soybeans, whose properties made it a poor functional substitute for butter or for deep-frying oil. This was because soybean oil had fats with several double bonds which makes them “polyunsaturated.” In order to make margarine as a butter substitute and get a beef tallow substitute for deep frying, a chemical conversion was used called “partial hydrogenation.” The problem with that was during the process, some of the remaining double bonds were altered to the chemically “trans” configuration rather than the dominant natural “cis” form. You can see how these two chemical structures differ in the photo below.

Using my old chemical model pieces to show the different between a cis and a trans bond. Cis is natural, trans is not.

In the late 1970s my wife was working on her Masters in Nutrition at UC Davis. In one of her classes she heard about this “trans fat” thing and came home and showed me how that changed the nature of a fat using her atomic modeling set. We both suspected that this would not be a good thing, so we started carefully avoiding products that said they contained “partially hydrogenated” fats. It turned out that indeed these “trans-fats” were worse and a culprit for increasing bad cholesterol in our blood systems and so my wife’s suspicions were confirmed. But during the twenty or so years before the required phase-out of trans-fats, my family got to enjoy butter, whole milk and bacon when others didn’t think they could! Also, by the way, McDonalds French fries were way tastier back in the days when they were cooked in beef tallow!

Now I should point out that the hydrogenation technology has improved so that trans-fats are not a current issue. There are also soybean varieties that have been improved so they have a nice mono-unsaturated fat content like Canola or Olive oils. Unfortunately, those are not used as widely as they could be because of the anti-GMO thing.

Americans got used to paying attention to implied health claims on the front label, and those began to proliferate. I believe it was with good intentions about people’s health, but there was also some marketing opportunism going on. The soybean processing industry started promoting the label, “contains no tropical oils” because their international competitors who supplied coconut and palm oil fell into the “saturated fat” category. I think it’s ironic that somehow coconut oil has now become a trendy option despite being a saturated fat. In any case, many health experts now believe that our obesity epidemic is at least partially fueled by the anti-fat trend shifting us toward more carbohydrates. Fats are what give the sense of satiety – of being full – so many people probably continue eating beyond what they need.

A New York Times Magazine article about this error.

This sort of barely regulated kind of marketing expanded to other “health demons” which eventually included sugar, antibiotics, hormones, gluten and GMOs. Now there are some people who actually need to avoid gluten because they have Celiac disease, but lots of people now avoid gluten for no good reason.

There is a related phenomenon involving the marketing of organic products. Most consumers think that organic means no pesticides. This is not true, its just that those farmers have a more limited set of options among the pesticides that are all rigorously regulated by the EPA. The organic list is not based on any legitimate scientific criterion to do with safety, just what some committee decides is “natural”. Organic farmers must deal with crop pests and are often less able to with their limited toolbox, and that is part of why they are less efficient than other farmers in terms of their use of resources like water, land, and energy.

Last year I had an opportunity to speak at the Banff Pork Summit which is an annual meeting about the science of pork production. One of the researchers had looked into the results when pork producers yielded to the pressure to eliminate antibiotics from their system. In this case it was not just a routine use for feed-efficiency but more of a preventive veterinary practice. Those producers saw at 5% or greater increase in the rate of mortality among their young pigs.

You see lots of chicken being promoted as “hormone free” which is misleading for two reasons. No chickens are given hormones anyway, but they most certainly make some of their own or they wouldn’t grow and develop normally. Again, “money for nothing.”

Now to be fair, some food is promoted for what it “is” for several meaningful categories like “rich in” vitamins, minerals or antioxidants. For cooking function, mono-unsaturated fats from things like olives or canola are good things. Whole grains and nuts are also legitimately promoted for what they are. Fish do, in fact, supply heart-healthy omega-3 fats. The bottom line is that we should all eat a diverse, moderate diet with lots of fruits and vegetables and get some exercise. That has always been true, but you can’t make a fortune selling a book about that diet.

So, are there any things we should not want in our food? Definitely! Mycotoxins produced by fungi that can infect certain crops are very harmful and we are fortunate that our farmers and food chain does a great job of monitoring, sorting, and pest control to keep those toxic things out of our food supply. There is an earlier POPAgriculture about the mycotoxin issue. We certainly don’t want human pathogenic bacteria in our food, which unfortunately does happen from time to time. We don’t want there to be dangerous levels of heavy metals like lead, cadmium or arsenic. What is interesting is that you don’t see food products being marketed for these legitimate “not” categories.

So, what is the takeaway here? Be skeptical of all marketing claims, particularly those that speak to what isn’t in your food options. Don’t pay that “money for nothing.” Get yourself some legitimate education about nutrition, even if Congress never followed through on helping us that way. Also, enjoy food and appreciate how good we have it here.