Feeding You Lies summary

Let’s start with two uncontroversial statements. First, everybody wants to be healthy. Second, the best way to increase your health is to pay attention to your diet. Why then is it so hard to figure out what a “healthy diet” actually looks like in practice?

Blame it on Big Food – the largest food-producing corporations in the United States. For decades, Big Food has been on a mission to deceive the public and hide the truth about its toxic bestsellers. The way it does this is by manipulating research.

Around 5 percent of the food sold in the United States these days is organic, and that number is constantly rising. No wonder conventional food producers are worried: organic is an attack on the toxic food they’ve been selling for decades, a new front in the war for Americans’ wallets. But before we get to that, let’s take a closer look at organic food. Just how much healthier is it really?

Well, a 2014 study published in the British Journal of Nutrition found that, compared to conventional tomatoes, organic tomatoes contain more vitamin C, antioxidants, and flavonoids – plant chemicals that stimulate detoxification enzymes in the liver. Organic meat and dairy have meanwhile been shown to contain around 50 percent more omega-3 fatty acids than non-organic products.

Trying to figure out what’s in the food you buy is like trying to read a language you don’t fully understand – you might catch the odd word here or there, but it’s mostly gobbledygook. That’s not accidental, either. All that unpronounceable jargon hides the fact that lots of products are packed with downright nasty ingredients.

Worse, the organization tasked with preventing this – the United States Food and Drug Administration, or FDA for short – is pretty much toothless. In fact, despite the FDA’s existence, the American food industry is still largely self-regulated.

The practice of adding nutrients to foods that naturally don’t contain them began in the United States in 1924, the year producers started adding iodine to salt to address a nationwide deficiency.

These days, however, what goes into the food we eat has less to do with public health concerns and more to do with marketing. Claims like “free from ingredient X” are often given pride of place on food packaging, but they’re rarely more than sleight of hand; in practice, leaving out actively harmful ingredients doesn’t make a product any healthier.