Meatonomics (5 page)

Because dietary cholesterol is present in animal foods but not in plant foods, a low-fat research cohort should eat only plant foods. Otherwise, low-fat eaters of animal foods can easily soak up cholesterol at levels equal to or greater than those in the high-fat cohort, and the low-fat diet will show little or no health difference when compared to the high-fat diet. Significantly, the research analyzed by the Siri-Tarino meta-study did not control for this cholesterol factor. In other words, there was no meaningful baseline for comparison since members of all cohorts consumed animal foods, and these all contained dietary cholesterol. As a result, it is little wonder the study found that low-fat diets and high-fat diets present comparable risks of heart disease. When you consider that chicken and salmon contain the same amount of cholesterol as ground beef (but less fat), it's not hard to see why Siri-Tarino's research found what it did.
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Many in the scientific community question such research methodology. One critic is T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus at Cornell University, lead researcher in numerous nutritional studies, and coauthor of
The China Study.
Campbell notes the practice of replacing
high-fat animal foods with low-fat animal foods, which is common in the studies analyzed by Siri-Tarino: “If one kind of animal-based food is substituted for another, then the adverse health effects of both foods, when compared to plant-based foods, are easily missed.”
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Discussing the Nurses' Health Study, a well-known study analyzed in Siri-Tarino, and which employed methodology typical of Siri-Tarino's other subject studies, Campbell writes:

It is the premier example of how reductionism in science can create massive amounts of confusion and misinformation, even when the scientists involved are honest, well-intentioned and positioned at the top institutions in the world. Hardly any study has done more damage to the nutritional landscape than the Nurses' Health Study, and it serves as a warning for the rest of science for what not to do.
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It may be irrelevant that the National Dairy Council helped fund the Siri-Tarino study by paying two of the study's four authors, including lead author Siri-Tarino.
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That's because the meta-study merely compiled results from dozens of other studies—many of which were not industry funded. Then again, even in such a meta-study, the criteria used for study selection can be highly subjective.

Further, the Siri-Tarino article appeared in
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
, published by the American Society for Nutrition. The journal frequently publishes research which concludes that animal foods are unhealthy, and many of those articles are cited in this book. On the other hand, as we've seen, the journal's overseeing organization is sponsored by the Dairy Council as well as others in the animal food industry and features an industry executive in one of its highest committee posts.

Regardless of whether Siri-Tarino is objective science or industry whitewashing, the importance of such research to animal food producers is clear. Research like Siri-Tarino can be highly effective at boosting product sales—in fact, sometimes even more effective than buying billboard space and running TV ads. One group found that $1 spent on pork research yielded a $25 return, while $1 spent on promotion
returned only $8.
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Perhaps Miller's claim of industry generosity is overstated. Perhaps checkoff programs in fact spend millions on research not to help the public but merely to find new ways to increase sales or reduce costs. One might well conclude that the prudent approach to such industry-funded research is to treat it as you would a carton of expired milk—with caution.

Do we need checkoffs? They stimulate the economy, but in the case of animal foods, they generate almost $2 in external costs for every $1 of stimulus. Some promote indisputably healthy foods like blueberries and mangoes; others encourage those who already eat too much animal foods to eat more. Perhaps the fundamental issue surrounding checkoffs is the one Huxley raised: whether it's appropriate for government to urge its citizens to buy things they don't really need.

Take animal foods off the table for a moment. In some ways, the question of government influence is as relevant for peanuts and popcorn, both of which have checkoff programs, as it is for meat, eggs, and dairy. Is it right for the state to use cute corporate mascots like Poppy and Captain Kernel to cajole us to buy more popcorn at the movies? Recall that this is not conventional advertising, in which one private firm tries to convince us its products are better than another's. This is government-sponsored, across-the-board demand boosting—designed to sell more of everything in the category. As the enabling legislation explains, checkoffs are meant to “increase the overall demand” for the goods they cover.
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These are the first few notes of a motif that repeats throughout this book like a songbird's call. As H. L. Mencken quipped, “When they say it's not about the money, it's about the money.” The federal government doesn't promote food to boost consumers' health. After all, many of the foods we're urged to buy are bad for us—particularly at the levels at which we're told to consume them. So why do our elected and appointed representatives tell us to eat more? Because industry demands it as a way to increase sales, and as we'll see, industry usually gets what it wants.

Not all checkoffs are created equal. Except for those covering animal foods, most checkoffs generate relatively low external costs. For checkoffs that promote low-impact goods like mangoes, blueberries, and mushrooms, perhaps the value of economic stimulus outweighs the creepiness associated with government influence. Or perhaps not. But at any rate, animal food checkoffs are in a herd of their own. They encourage Americans to consume meat, eggs, and dairy at much higher levels than normal. They drive disproportionately high external costs. The worst part, as we'll see in
chapter 6
, is that checkoffs help to sicken an already-ill nation. Maybe the question we should ask ourselves about these programs is: Got Milked?

• Although Americans already consume much more animal foods than the USDA recommends, that agency continues to oversee checkoff programs that spend $557 million yearly urging us to buy and eat even more of these foods.
  
• Checkoffs are remarkably effective. By funding aggressive marketing and research programs that convince consumers that animal foods are a healthy and necessary part of our daily diet, checkoffs boost sales by as much as $38 for each checkoff dollar spent.
  
• Without government involvement, checkoffs would be dramatically less effective and perhaps even nonexistent. If the USDA disengaged from checkoffs that promote animal foods, it would significantly reduce the nation's routine overconsumption of these foods.
  

A deadly strain of swine flu raced across North America in the spring of 2009, infecting one in five Americans and hospitalizing a quarter of a million people. As sick air travelers rapidly spread the virus throughout the rest of the world, the World Health Organization issued its highest level pandemic warning. In the United States, a determined group of animal food producers and government officials sprang into action to address the crisis. But this wasn't the type of emergency-response coalition you might expect: its focus was on saving profits, not people. As a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council warned, “This flu is being called something that it isn't, and it's hurting our entire industry. It is not a ‘swine’ flu, and people need to stop calling it that . . . they're ruining people's lives.”
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For years, the animal food industry has sought—successfully, in most cases—to mold consumer attitudes. We've seen how well-funded government checkoff programs urge us to buy more meat and dairy. But checkoffs are just one piece of meatonomics' multipronged messaging machine. This chapter explores some of the other ways the industry shapes American attitudes toward meat and dairy to keep itself in the black.

Of course, product marketing is as American as apple pie. Animal food producers are certainly not the only manufacturers to use sophisticated marketing and public relations tactics to sell their goods. But there is something unique about the messaging that
this
industry disseminates. Frequently, as we'll see, communications from industrial animal farmers lack an essential element that consumers expect
and
the law requires: fair play. In some cases, their words are
technically accurate but nevertheless unfair or misleading. In others, they're just plain wrong. And when people rely on incorrect or deceptive information about food, the results can be downright dangerous to their health. As with many of the industry's other characteristics explored in this book, this shady approach to salesmanship often puts meat and dairy producers in a class of their own. Honesty only makes sense, said Mark Twain, “when there's money in it.” When it comes to promoting animal foods, it seems dishonesty pays.

The pork industry's fear of lives “ruin[ed]” from the 2009 flu pandemic came to pass in ways more literal than envisioned. After suffering advanced flu symptoms like chills, fever, coughs, vomiting, and diarrhea, some twelve thousand Americans ultimately died from swine influenza.
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While a variety of state and federal agencies worked to help the sick and educate the public, the US Department of Agriculture turned its nursing skills to the pork industry's financial health. At a press conference in April 2009, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack reassured a worried nation, “There are a lot of hardworking families whose livelihood depends on us conveying this message of safety . . . and we want to reinforce the fact that we're doing everything we possibly can to make sure that our hog industry is sound and safe. . . . This really isn't swine flu. It's H1N1 virus.”
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Governmental, educational, and medical institutions quickly adopted the official name change. At the health care company where I work as general counsel, amid some confusion as to what to call the disease threatening our elderly patient base, our chief medical officer instructed all personnel to begin using the new name immediately. Yet the sudden and unexplained name change caught some observers off guard. “H1N1? . . . Huh?” asked one ABC News reporter, “Not swine flu? . . . What changed?”
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For trivia buffs interested in which name is actually correct, H1N1 or swine flu, the answer is both. H1N1 is clinically acceptable. But swine flu is also accurate, notwithstanding the pork industry's claims—later shown to be false—that no pigs were involved. A group
of scientists around the world studied the origins of the flu pandemic and published their results in the June 2009 issue of
Nature.
The thirteen scientists concluded that the disease started “in swine, and that the initial transmission [from pigs] to humans occurred several months before recognition of the outbreak.” These findings, according to the scientists, “highlight the need for systematic surveillance of influenza in swine, and provide evidence that the mixing of new genetic elements in swine can result in the emergence of viruses with pandemic potential in humans.”
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The official name change likely helped the pork industry avoid further losses, but it also deflected legitimate attention from the real source of the problem: sick pigs.
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In an age when any news—good or bad—travels at the speed of light, negative headlines can hurt an industry in real and lasting ways. For pork producers already reeling from years of losses related to high feed costs, the swine flu debacle could have been much worse. Consider a recent naming crisis that hit one producer especially hard: the pink slime episode of 2012. Known to the industry as lean, finely textured beef, pink slime is a protein paste created by spinning otherwise-inedible beef scraps in a centrifuge and treating it with ammonia to kill bacteria. US law allows the product to be added to ground beef as filler in amounts up to 15 percent without additional labeling. After ABC News reported in March 2012 that more than two-thirds of ground beef in the United States contained pink slime, public response was swift and merciless. The nation's largest grocery chains—Supervalu, Kroger, Safeway, Stop & Shop, and Food Lion—announced they would no longer sell ground beef containing the additive.

Striking faster than Lindsay Lohan's PR people after one of the starlet's run-ins with the law, Beef Products Inc. (BPI), the product's manufacturer, fought back. Three state governors—Rick Perry of Texas, Sam Brownback of Kansas, and Terry Branstad of Iowa—toured a BPI plant with reporters and munched on burgers containing the controversial additive. T-shirts were printed with the odd slogan, “Dude, It's Beef.” Government officials even pitched in; one Georgia bureaucrat begged media to use the product's “proper name.”
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But it was too little, too late—public opinion had formed and would not be changed. As demand for pink slime plummeted, BPI was forced to close three of its four plants.
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If a manufacturer can be pushed to the brink this quickly, it's easy to see why meat and dairy producers pursue messaging with such determination.

It takes lobbying to convince government to change the name of a disease or to officially promote a consumer-friendly product name. However, because checkoff organizations are legally prohibited from lobbying, a variety of special-purpose organizations handle the task. More than a dozen politically focused trade groups apply pressure to our state and federal lawmakers on issues like what to call food. Because some of these groups aren't required to file tax returns, it's hard to gauge their spending. For those groups who do file returns, annual spending totals more than $138 million.
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Added to the spending by checkoff programs, that brings the tally to nearly $700 million in total documented yearly spending by animal food trade groups to spread their message or influence lawmakers. Of course, this excludes outlays by individual producers like Cargill, Smithfield, Tyson, and others. It also excludes some large trade groups whose financial statements are not public. One of these, for example, is the United Egg Producers—the main trade group representing the $6.5 billion US egg industry.
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