Handout - Killer Kernel

8/3/2019 Handout - Killer Kernel

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Corporate Knights, Issue 33, 2010 Health Issue

http://www.corporateknights.ca/article/killer-kernel?page=show

The Killer KernelThe skinny on what's expanding our waistlines and crippling our health system.

Written by Toby A.A. Heaps

Photo credit: Eamon Mac Mahonake a look next time you are at the supermarket. More than a quarter of everything on the shelveshas corn in it. Most of the eggs, meat and poultry, and even the natural salmon are made ofcorn. The chicken nugget is corn flour piled on corn-fed chicken fried in corn oil. Corn is in yourcoffee whitener, Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, canned fruit, ketchup, pop, and vitamins. Those

ingredients too hard to pronouncemaltodextrin, crystalline fructose, dextrose, lactic acid, msg,polyols, caramel colour, xanthan gumare all made from corn.

How does our corn-dominated food system relate to human health? Wayne Roberts, one of theholistic food movements original iron horses and the author ofThe No- Nonsense Guide toWorld Food, doesnt mince words with his answer. We have a health care system that doesn'tcare about food, and a food system that doesn't care about health. To his mind corn is the mostobvious example. Its the most subsidized crop in the world, and it has only negative healthconsequences. The Environmental Working Group pegs U.S. corn subsidies from 1995 to 2009at us $73 billion, or about $5 billion per year.

The trouble with corn, or at least the industrial feedstock variety grown in North America,Roberts explains, is its an extremely low-nutrient food, just an energy provider, which is usedin an agricultural system that does not value human, animal, or environmental health as one of itsoutcomes.

Forty per cent of U.S.-produced corn goes to fatten cows, pigs, and other livestock for meat, milkand eggs. Ethanol takes about a third. And, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) gulps up aboutthree per cent, with exports and other making up the remainder.

Citing the corn-fed, fatty meat, and HFCS-based soda-pop obesity epidemic, Stephen Mackoasks, We are overwhelmingly corn, but what price have we paid?

As a professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia, Mackoknew the two trillion-plus corn plants grown each year in Iowa300 for every man, woman andchild on the planethad to be going somewhere. Macko estimates after water, the number onecomponent in humans comes from corn. Were essentially walking corn chips.

Hair functions as a nuanced physical record of diet over time, much like a tape recording, heexplains. His collection includes locks from George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, Diane
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Sawyer, and his favourite, Oetzi the Iceman. Through a complex process involving burning thehair to measure the isotopes released, his testing finds on average, about half the carbon in anaverage North American is derived from corn.

This is not surprising. In many ways corn is the perfect industrial crop. It is an abundant source

of cheap interchangeable calories, and with a large amount of fertilizer, can be grown rapidly andpredictably often on a one-person, one-machine farm enterprise. But Roberts is concerned thatwhile corn may be good for the industrial food system, it is dysfunctional to human andplanetary health. Its highly mechanized nature is hollowing out rural communities, its emptycalories in our meat and pop is blowing up our waistlines, its fertilizer and pesticides arepolluting our drinking water, and the industrialized food system it sustainswhere the averagemolecule of food eaten in North America has travelled 4,000 kilometresis polluting our air.

Are we eating too much corn? There's a saying a tonne of anything looks ugly, starts Dr.David Jenkins. As the Canada Research Chair in Nutrition and Metabolism at University ofToronto and Director of the Clinical and Risk Factor Modification Centre at St Michael'sHospital, he is one of Canadas most respected nutritionists and has also worked with Loblaws todevelop its Blue Menu line of healthier food products.

When corn feeds millions of cattle a day, which is inefficient because of its low nutritional value,or when a lot of corn sweeteners are added to make food interesting, then I think youre cateringto a population that is not only growing vastly in numbers, but vastly in size. I'd say the biggerissue behind the corn story is the growth of the human population and the growth of the humanappetite.

Jenkins chief concern is the big picture, a planet showing signs of collapse under the weight of aburgeoning population of nine billion consumers. For him, corn is not the problem. Rather, it isone of the symptoms of the age-old Malthusian problemtoo many people consuming toomuch. He knows his message is likely to fall on deaf ears, and he doesnt try to mask the sense ofurgency or frustration.

Our bulging corn-filled bellies are busting the health care bank. The annual health care bill inCanada is over $180 billion per year and about 12 per cent of GDP. Diet-related chronic diseasessuch as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and stroke make up two-thirds of the directcosts and will increase in the coming years.

And if children are our future, the prospects look even grimmer. For the first time in twocenturies, the current generation of children in America may have less healthful and shorter livesthan their parents, according to a 2005 report in the New England Journal of Medicine. While

American kids are fatter than Canadians, our tots are tipping the scales at similar thresholds.Canada has one of the highest rates of childhood obesity in the developed world, ranking fifthout of 34 oecd countries. As of 2004, 26 per cent of young Canadians aged 2 to 17 years areoverweight or obese, up from 15 per cent in 1978.

As a result of food-related disease, among other things, we have an outdated sickcare system thatwill bankrupt our nation, says Carole Taylor, B.C.s former minister of finance. We can choose to


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spend 80 per cent of provincial budgets taking care of sick people, we can go two-tier, or we canaddress the root of the problem with prevention or, in this case, food.

Bridging the silos of government so we have systems for health across all relevant ministries,including agriculture is something long advocated for by Dr. Carolyn Bennett, Canadas Minister

of Public Health from 2003 to 2006.

Do you think we should have a strong fence at the top of the cliff, or a state-of-the-art fleet ofambulances and paramedics waiting at the bottom? asks Bennett. Yet the health ministry hasalmost none of the tools required to build a fence. The health of our population cannot be thesole responsibility of the Ministry of Health, she says, openly confessing she wasnt able to puther fingers on many of the crucial levers that influence health while in power. With time on thesidelines to reflect, she helped unveil the Liberal partys national food policy this spring, markingthe first time an official federal party document linked farmers to health care. We cant preventdisease, fight obesity or control health care costs if we dont get more healthy home-grown foodon our tables, she said at the policy launch. Our farmers will be central to meeting the healthcare challenge of the next decade.

Federal Minister of Agriculture Gerry Ritz, unfortunately, could not offer similar insights. Hisemail response to a query on what Canada is doing to align the agricultural system with betterhealth outcomes said his government is focusing on making Canadian farmed products seem safefor international trade, but did not comment on the health of said products.

Dr. Franco Sassi explains we subsidize fat 50 times more than food with functional healthbenefits like fruits and vegetables, and in many cases subsidies actually serve to raise the price offruits and vegetables.

As author ofObesity and the Economics of Prevention: Fit not Fat, which was presented to the

OECDs Health Ministerial Meeting in October 2010, Sassi is disappointed the agriculturalministers werent invited to the October meeting, because the health ministers dont have muchpower over agricultural subsidies. He also says while obesity is the result of too many caloriesand too little activity, studies show it is cheaper to influence a persons diet than their physicalactivity.

The mainstream media missed most of the interesting parts ofFit not Fat, merely mentioning ourclimbing obesity rate. While Canada is one of the fattest countries in OECD, there are signs ourbattle with the bulge may be waning, as the rate of increase in adulthood obesity has been theslowest in the OECD. Canada can also save 25,000 lives a year by implementing a suite ofpolicy interventions, ranging from nutrition counselling to taxes to labellingmost interventions

cost less than $200 million per year.

But the most interesting takeaway is that Canada may be the best guinea pig for fiscal measuresthat make healthy food more affordable and fat food more expensivethe only interventionrecommended by the OECD that actually pays for itself. The OECD analysis considered a fattax/thin subsidy model where fiscal measures would increase the price of foods with a high fatcontent by ten per cent, and decrease the price of fruit and vegetables in the same proportionsaving 8,510 lives per year in Canada at almost no cost.


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Dalton McGuinty played with the idea of fat taxes in Ontario in 2004, before retreating onaccount of the outcry that it would be a poor tax disproportionately hurting lower-incomegroups. Well, according to the oecd analysis, a fat tax combined with a thin subsidy wouldboost the fortunes of the less financially stable more so in Canada than in almost any otherOECD country. Interestingly, the OECD also found implementing a food advertising regulation

to limit the marketing of junk food to children, had a similar positive impact on lower incomegroups in Canada.

Kelly Brownell heads up The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, andhis mission is to battle obesity precisely by using a fat tax/thin subsidy combination, subsidizingproduce and health promotion with a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. Healthy food costs toomuch and unhealthy food costs too little, he says. The USDA estimates his proposed penny-per-ounce tax would reduce consumption by between 10 and 23 per cent. The Congressional BudgetOffice calculates this tax would raise $150 billion over ten years, while reducing health carecosts in the U.S. by $50 billion. Brownell says there are currently 17 cities and states in the U.S.who are serious about this.

Not surprisingly, and like big tobacco before them, the front men for soda conglomerates likeCoca-Cola and Pepsi are hitting back with a vengeance. The American Beverage Association haspoured millions of dollars into ballot initiatives to repeal soda taxes. Refreshments Canada is noshrinking violet either.

After Corporate Knights contacted Coke about soda taxes, Justin Sherwood, RefreshmentsCanadas rather jovial president, became our new best friend. He feels a soda tax unfairly singlesout a single industry, and would not make a dent in obesity, as full calorie soft drinks account forjust 2.5 per cent of the average calories consumed daily. When asked what he thinks of a revenueneutral approach of offsetting an unhealthy sugared-soda tax, with equivalent rebates for otheroptions, Sherwood dismissed the idea as social engineering on a grand scale, while takingexception to the characterization that sugared soda-pop is unhealthy.

All beverages can be considered healthy,like a slice of chocolate cake can be healthy, or ahamburger can be healthy. Just dont eat it morning noon and night, he said.

Over the course of the next two days, Sherwood diligently e-mailed no less than 16 studiesshowing HFCS is no better or worse than other sweeteners. Interestingly, a recent Princetonstudy found in some instances, rats fed kibble with HFCS gained significantly more weight thanrats fed kibble with table sugar, even though their overall caloric intake was the same. AfterBrownell saw the reports, he pointed out that many of the authors take lots of money fromindustry.

Whether were dealing with corn-fattened beef, or the HFCS in Coke, corn is just the medium ofexpression for an industrial logic that caters to human weakness. The agricultural production ofcorn operates in the increasingly out-of-touch abstraction that Planet Earth is a wholly-ownedsubsidiary of the economy. But we are finally waking up to the dementia of the commoditizedfood system because of the staggering costs showing up in the health care bill threatening tocripple government finances.


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The people closest to the action, the farmers, are voting with their feetfleeing the commoditypit that used to be a family farm, for greener pastures.

We lost 10,000 farmers between 2006 and 2008, out of 120,000 farmers in the country, saysJoan Brady, National Farmers Union (NFU) National Womens President. The combined debt of

Canadian farmers is $65 billion. While the government hands out billions of dollars of farmsupport payments each year, it does so based on gross margins, not the nutritional value of foodraised.

The problem, says Ross Hinther, Director of Research for NFU, is that the farmer has nomarket power. The supply chain is dominated by a small number of industrial players who setprices and call the shots.

For example, just two companies, Tyson and Cargill, control 80 per cent of meatpacking. Whatis lacking is domestic marketing and physical infrastructure that supports farmers, and amisguided federal policy that is all geared to exporting food as a commodity, Brady explains. Toget things back on track, we need a paradigm shift predicated on Canadian farmers feedingCanadians first, the resurrection of the family farm, and fiscal recognition of the environmentalgood and services that farmers protect and generate.

President and CEO of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, David McInnes published similarthoughts in a 2009 report, We are on track for 80 per cent of provincial budgets going to healthcare, and we are spending billions of dollars on farmers income support. We need to reconcilethese two, he says. Our food system, human health, and ecological well-being are allconnected, and agriculture can be a solution provider to all of them.

The last word goes to behavioural economist Dan Ariely. I think fatty, sugary foods build onsome of our human weaknesses. We just like fat and sugar, he says. And when we design the

world around us, we can do it either with a view to abuse our inherent nature, or we can try totake it into account and make it so we dont fall victim to our worst instincts.

This article has been nominated for a RNAO Award for Excellence in Health-Care Reporting.

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Handout - Killer Kernel