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[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

 This is an interesting editorial from George Will this weekend.  He
has obviously become a enthusiast  of the teachings of Michael Pollan.

  My Granny was born right about the turn of the twentieth century and lived 
to be in her nineties,  She never ate much storebought food, never ate much 
meat, (and of couse, never smoked). She would have a bit of pork in her beans 
or one piece of fried chicken, but she always preferred garden vegetables. 
She was always small and never had a heart problem. 

 Of couse, all of the above applied to her husband (my grandfather) but, he 
died of heart failure, among other things, when my father was a small child 
in the early 1940s. 

 Still, this article and others like it make a lot of sense to me.  I wish I 
had known all of this information when I was young.

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Where the Obesity Grows
 
By George F. Will

Sunday, March 8, 2009; Page A17 



We're from I-o-way, I-o-way, 

State of all the land 

Joy on ev'ry hand . . . 

That's where the tall corn grows. 

-- Iowa's unofficial song 



Tom Vilsack, Iowa's former governor, calls his "the most important department 
in government," noting that the Agriculture Department serves education 
through school nutrition programs and serves diplomacy by trying to wean 
Afghanistan from a poppy-based (meaning heroin-based) economy. But Vilsack's 
department matters most because of the health costs of the American diet. If 
Michael Pollan is right, the problem is rooted in politics and, in a sense, 
Iowa. 

Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food," says 
that after World War II, the government had a huge surplus of ammonium 
nitrate, an ingredient of explosives -- and fertilizer. Furthermore, 
pesticides could be made from ingredients of poison gases. Since 1945, the 
food supply has increased faster than America's population -- faster even 
than Americans can increase their feasting. 


Agricultural commodity prices generally fall. But since a rare surge in food 
prices gave the Nixon administration a political scare, government policy, 
expressed in commodity subsidies, has been, Pollan writes, to sell "large 
quantities of calories as cheaply as possible," especially calories coming 
from corn. 

"All flesh is grass" says the scripture. Much of the too-ample flesh of 
Americans (three of five are overweight; one in five is obese) comes from 
corn, which is a grass. A quarter of the 45,000 items in the average 
supermarket contain processed corn. Fossil fuels are involved in planting, 
fertilizing, harvesting, transporting and processing the corn. America's food 
industry uses about as much petroleum as America's automobiles do. 

During World War II, when meat, dairy products and sugar were scarce, heart 
disease plummeted. It rebounded when rationing ended. "When you adjust for 
age," Pollan writes, "rates of chronic diseases like cancer and type 2 
diabetes are considerably higher today than they were in 1900." Type 2 
diabetes -- a strange epidemic: one without a virus, bacteria or other 
microbe -- was called adult-onset diabetes until children began getting it. 
Now it is a $100 billion-a-year consequence of, among other things, obesity 
related to a corn-based diet, which is partly because steaks and chops have 
pushed plants off the plate. 



Four of the top 10 causes of American deaths -- coronary heart disease, 
diabetes, stroke and cancer -- have, Pollan says, "well-established links" to 
diet, particularly through "the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and 
fat." What he calls America's "national eating disorder" is not just that 
Americans reportedly eat one in five meals in cars (gas stations make more 
from food and cigarettes than from gasoline) and that one in three children 
eat fast food every day. He also means the industrialization of agriculture, 
wherein we developed a food chain that derives too much of its calories -- 
energy -- not from the sun through photosynthesis but from fossil fuels. 

In 1900, Vilsack says, Iowa's population was larger than California's and 
Florida's combined. But it is the only state whose population did not double 
in the 20th century. Yet Iowa's fewer farmers, planting (as government has 
exhorted) "fencerow to fencerow" and deploying an arsenal of chemical 
fertilizers, can tickle five tons of corn from an acre. 

Corn, which covers 125,000 square miles of America -- about the size of New 
Mexico -- fattens 100 million beef cattle and at least that many bipeds. Much 
of the river of cheap corn becomes an ocean of high-fructose corn syrup, 
which by 1984 was sweetening Coke and Pepsi. Disposing of the corn also 
requires passing it through animals' stomachs. Corn, together with 
pharmaceuticals and other chemicals -- a Pollan axiom: "You are what what you 
eat eats, too" -- has made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots rather 
than grass, cutting by up to 75 percent the time from birth to slaughter. 
Eating corn nourished by petroleum-based fertilizers, a beef cow consumes 
almost a barrel of oil in its lifetime. 


Vilsack's department is entwined with the food industry that produces a food 
supply unhealthily simplified by the dominance of a few staples such as corn. 
This diet, Pollan says, has made many Americans both overfed and 
undernourished. 

Hippocrates enjoined doctors: "Do no harm." He also said something germane to 
a nation that is harming itself with its knives and forks: "Let food be thy 
medicine." That should be carved in stone over the entrance to Vilsack's very 
important department. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/06/AR2009030602070.html?hpid=opinionsbox1