Movember -- Day 4

Processed food.  As with any "movement", there is pushback.  Not against processed food, in favor of it!  You had to see this coming.  Corporations, besides being people, are organized to benefit their shareholders.  Many of you, like me, have spent decades working for corporations.  How many times have you heard some version of "Shareholder Focus, Customer Focus, Employee Focus...and the greatest of these is Shareholder"?!?

So the people...er, corporations...who sell us prepared food use packaging and messaging to convince us that their food is healthy.  The mere fact that it is cooked by someone else does not make it evil (with apologies to Michael Pollan), but there are two things we need to keep in mind:

1. Corporations focus on shareholder value, not customer health, so they will reach for sales, market share and profitability in any way they legally can
2. Processed food can take months to get from the factory kitchen to your home, so something has to keep it from spoiling

One thing we forget about the plethora** of brands available to us is that they are mostly controlled by one of 10 behemoth companies:

Again, this in and of itself is not evil.  But it means there is a huge focus on market share.  A family-owned company producing a single product needs to sell enough to stay in business.  An aggressive family-owned business may want to sell 10% more this year than last to grow the business.  But a corporation needs to show growth quarter-over-quarter and are only rewarded by the market when they achieve YOY growth of 20% or more.

So what?

So Kraft, with a huge market share in 2000, began to focus more on nutrition in an attempt to get ahead of predicted consumer trends in healthier eating.  Baby boomers were now between 36 and 54 years old, so they had kids, retirement and aging issues on their minds.  Kraft voluntarily added nutrition information beyond what was mandated by the USDA at the time; reduced salt, fat and sugar content in a number of products; and introduced smaller portions (like the 100-calorie Oreo pack).

Hershey responded by introducing S'Mores cookies in 2003, with more fat and sugar than the slimmed down Oreos.  S'Mores are a 46g bar with 11 grams of fat , 20g of sugar and 230 total calories.  Kraft's response?  Triple Double Oreos -- 100 calories for a single cookie!  When's the last time any of us ate a single Oreo and stopped?

David Friedman wrote an article in The Atlantic defending processed food and attempting to de-canonize the natural/raw foodies (Sts. Pollan and Bittman).  He has fundamental flaws at the core of his argument, however:

1. None of the Naturalists have said the math in eating doesn't matter.  Friedman tries to make Whole Foods products look unhealthy by comparing their caloric content to fast food.  True you can't eat 4,000 calories a day and expect to stay at your current weight, but that's a different argument than eating preservatives vs. not eating preservatives.  As I've said previously, we need to remember that weight maintenance and overall health are two different things.
2. Corporations are for-profit people...uh, entities.  We like the taste of salt, fat and sugar.  Put it in a product and we're going to buy it.  Panera Bread makes an amazing Chipotle Chicken Sandwich on Artisan French Bread.  It's got all of the right modifiers to suck me in (more than 5 words; a specific variant of an ingredient; a job title; and a European reference).  It's also got over 2,100 grams of sodium and 840 calories.  That doesn't count the chips I'm definitely having with this one.  We can say we're going to eat healthier (and I'm planning on saying it daily for the rest of the month...but not on Thanksgiving), but corporations will find ways to get us to buy things that make us feel like we're treating ourselves (even though we're killing ourselves...ah, the majesty of human nature).  And recall that companies like McDonalds make a lot of money selling inexpensive foods.  Herbs cost about 10 times what industrial salt costs.  Guess which one they're going to use?  Profits, not customer health, drive their behavior. 

Sunday:

• Breakfast 
• 8 oz Prune Juice
• Green Drink 
• Mid-Morning Snack 
• Mint Fruit Juice (pineapple, green apple, mint)
• Lunch 
• Green Drink
• Spicy Lemonade (lemon juice, cayenne pepper, blue agave syrup)
• Dinner
• Pesto pasta (thanks, Geri & Michael!), grated parmesan
• 3 glasses of barbaresco  
• Activity:
• Baseball w/Andre -- 30 minutes