What to Eat and Why: Marion Nestle Nails the Food Monster Industry is Worse Threat to the US than Iran Eat Fruit and Veg, B12 only supplement needed Fight the Farm Bill in 2012 and its subsidies for empty carbs In a knockout presentation last night (Thu Mar 2 2012) at Barnard in front of a packed crowd of young and bright coeds Marion Nestle, NYU professor and prominent authority on all things food (Food Politics, What to Eat etc) nailed the food industry monster which is eating away at America's - and now the world's - health to the wallboard of revelation in all its metastasising aspects, including the new land rush in emerging nations in which indigenous small farmers are being ousted by giant corporations who will replace their home grown healthy crops with vast fields of monocultured, genetically modified, nutrient empty cattle fodder such as the denatured corn which is now giving many of the American poor and jobless middle class customers of McDonald's paltry hamburgers and syrup packed soda the horrid ailment of severe diabetes and eventually the loss of their extremities. Luckily Marion has a bustling cheerfulness about her which doesn't allow her to go into the dark depths of the predicament that American families are being led into, which is counted by some a worse threat to our right to happiness that the Iran nuclear weapon coming over the horizon of Middle Eastern politics. But by the time she had finished her comprehensive run through of the main outlines of this nation gobbling dragon all present could see the huge dimension of the health catastrophe looming now that the advertising which seduces the masses into this nutritional desert is bigger than many nations budgets and has been unleashed from most regulation. Here are the slides she showed which tell you the stats behind the concern. The only things missing seemed to be good news on the countermovement front, and she ended her talk by urging everyone not only to eat their fruit and veg but to do what they can to prevent the passage of the Farm Bill this year, which will continue the subsidies lavished by the Federal government which encourage giant farmers to maximize output of the acres of carbohydrates such as kernel diminished corn which are packaged in misleading wrapping and cartons and incorporated into hamburgers from corn fed cattle and sodas swallowed in lethal quantity by the poor who cannot afford better, since unsubsidized fruit and veg are much more costly. One alarming claim she endorsed was the conclusion of recent studies which have shown that supplements really don't help much except for the single exception, she said, of Vitamin B12, which vegans (we like to pronounce that vejans to rhyme with vegetables and not ve-gans) do really need to take in some form to replace that found in meats. In some cases, the studies find, supplements can damage the health. One big problem is that the body demands a complex assortment of different nutrients to take advantage of the powers sought in taking supplements, though Nestole didn't explain why this could not be effected simply by eating the right food along with the supplements. We therefore took the opportunity in question time of reminding her that a slew of studies in the lab and on animals in the last decade or two have confirmed that phytochemicals and particularly flavonoids (associated with color) have remarkable powers in stymying or even reversing cancer, with cells very often being killed off faster with these plant extracts than the drugs of chemotherapy. How we asked can the individual take advantage of this promising fact if the amounts involved in the tests are so much bigger - orders of magnitude bigger - than what is made available to the body in a normal diet? She acknowledged that this was a matter in which we desperately needed more research, which she hoped would take place. We agree. We hope that the student body at Barnard have taken her lesson to heart, and we hope that the word reaches the rotund beauty who gave us a nice smile as she entered the elevator before the talk, which apparently she was not going to attend. It remains possible of course that this lovely person was suffering from a genetic predisposition to putting on weight, but Marion Nestle started her lecture by pointing out the basic truth in food which remains a simple overriding principle for one and all: intake of calories = accumulation of body weight - expenditure of calories through exercise.