The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (62 page)

Now that you know the truth—that food addiction is a social problem—you understand that we need social reform to set things right. Public health interventions are needed to protect the public, and we accept them all the time: seat belt laws, vaccination laws, smoking and alcohol regulations and taxes, food safety laws, elimination of leaded gas and paint. When the science has proven that processed food and especially sugar are addictive, it changes the conversation. When your brain is on drugs, willpower and personal responsibility are a fiction.

The sticking point is that the government doesn’t want to get on the bad side of the one-trillion-dollar food industry. There’s a reason that Michelle Obama agreed to call her campaign to fight childhood obesity “Let’s Move.” It was pressure from the food industry to not point fingers at food; they are stuck on the old mantra that there are no good or bad foods. The name “Let’s Move” implies that the solution to our kids’ problems lies simply in more exercise, and not in changing our food environment. And while the program itself does address changes in diet, including the need to improve the food in schools, those recommendations don’t go nearly far enough. In fact, she partnered with the food industry to take 1.5 trillion calories out of the American diet. Sounds great, right? But this was accomplished by making Oreo cookies 90 instead of 100 calories, or cutting 15 calories out of a Pop Tart. They coopted the message, subverted the initiative. Oreos and Pop Tarts and all the other junk is still junk, even if it has a few less calories.

Everyone—including the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the surgeon general’s office—is pussyfooting around and not calling out the food industry for loading us up with sugar. They all talk about “making better choices” and getting more exercise. But this approach unfairly blames the victims of a toxic food environment in which it is hard for most people to find real, fresh food.

We live in a toxic food landscape with tantalizing, addictive choices everywhere we go. The food industry justifies its production of toxic, addictive food by saying “We are just producing what our customers want.” Of course they are. If they sold $2.99 bags of cocaine, a lot of customers would want that, too!

Fast-food and convenience stores far outnumber supermarkets and produce markets in most areas of the country. There is something called the Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI), which measures food deserts. It is the number of fast-food and convenience stores divided by the number of supermarkets and produce markets. In some parts of the country, that junk-to-real-food ratio is more than 10 to 1.

Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, who didn’t need or take money from interest groups to get elected, took a tough stand on changing the food environment so that it was more conducive to health. He implemented, among other things, smoking bans in public places and bans on trans fats. While his attempts to stop food stamp use for soda and to implement a soda tax were thwarted by the food industry, he brought national attention to this issue by trying to limit the sizes of soda sold in certain places. He might not have been able to accomplish all of his goals, but his efforts were enormously successful in raising public awareness about the insanity of our current food environment—and about who is really running the show.

Nobody wants government interference unless it is necessary to protect the health and welfare of its citizens. Nobody wants a nanny state telling us what to eat or how to live. But in fact, that is what we do have—just in reverse, with government policies that support, protect, and aid the one-trillion-dollar food industry rather than its people.

Detoxing our world requires widespread social and policy changes that make it easier to be healthy than to be sick or fat. There are many, many ways to start to reverse the national spiral of food addiction and obesity. Research has shown that public health education is necessary but not sufficient. Despite ongoing education and awareness of the dangers of sugar and industrial food, our health declines and our waistlines grow.

Changing the toxic food environment so people have better choices is a major requirement. If you go to the movies and the smallest soda is thirty-two ounces, how is that a choice? Especially when studies show that people will eat whatever is put in front of them, no matter the size. Given what we know now about the addictive nature of sugar and especially of sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened beverages, we can no longer hide from or ignore this problem.

The more informed you are about what’s going on and what can (and should) be done, the more voices we can lend to the global cause of fighting back. Learn as much as you can about what’s going on behind the scenes in our food environment that directly affects your and your family’s health and well-being. Write to your congressperson and senator and the White House. Write or e-mail the specific agencies in charge of food policy (the USDA, the FDA, and the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC). Use www.change.org to start a petition on any one of the topics below and make your voice heard.

Here are the changes that I believe we, as a country, should be striving for, to stop the babysitting of the food industry and start safeguarding the health of our families and citizens:

1.
Start a petition to change the name of the Farm Bill to the Food Bill,
because that’s what it is. And stop subsidizing prices and profits for corn and soy that are turned into the high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats used to make sodas and processed food.

2.
Write to Congress demanding that every Farm Bill program that provides food to the poor and underserved (those most at risk for obesity) meet the highest nutritional standards and science of optimal nutrition.
This goes for the food stamp or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Women, Infants, and Children food program (WIC), Emergency Food Assistance Program, and the National School Lunch Program. The 2012 guidelines for the school lunch program required limits on saturated fat, sodium, calories, and trans fats, but there was no mention of sugar, even though the average teenager consumes about thirty teaspoons of sugar a day, or the equivalent of two 20-ounce sodas a day.

3.
Call for the FDA to change the status of high-fructose corn syrup from GRAS
(generally regarded as safe) to unsafe in currently consumed amounts. It is not safe in normally consumed amounts (about 15 percent of our total calories).

4.
Advocate for the government to support the 2002 recommendations by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations as detailed in a report called “Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases,”
which calls for a limit on sugar to no more than 10 percent of total calories in the diet. In 2004, the WHO received a letter from the Bush administration stating that there was no evidence that fruits and vegetables prevented disease or that energy-dense, sugar-rich foods or fast foods contributed to obesity. No evidence?? The message from the government here was clear: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s made up.” The Bush administration, under pressure from the food lobby, threatened that if the report was published, the US would withhold its $406-million contribution to the WHO.

5.
Demand that the food stamp, or SNAP, program no longer cover the purchase of sodas.
Our government pays $4 billion a year to buy sodas for the poor with food stamps. That translates into 29 million servings of soda a day, or 10 billion servings a year to the poor, who suffer disproportionately from obesity, diabetes, and chronic disease and drive significant health care costs. Our government pays for soda on the front end and health care on the back end through Medicaid and Medicare.

6.
Lobby for the White House not to sign the “Cheeseburger Bill,” also called the “American Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act,”
which would protect the food industry from lawsuits for harm caused by their products. Isn’t the government’s role to protect its citizens, not corporations?

7.
Insist that the government block the “Protecting Foods and Beverages from Government Attack Act of 2012,”
which would prohibit the use of federal money for public health campaigns against soda and other processed foods proven to cause obesity and disease.

8.
Support a Federal Trade Commission ban on all sugar and processed food marketing to children.
The FTC should revisit its 1972 prosecution of the sugar industry for promoting harmful, deceptive ads. The health ministers of fifty-two nations met and agreed to ban the marketing of junk food to children. Congress threatened to defund the FTC unless it stopped attempting to prevent junk food advertising to children. The US and Syria are among the few nations that allow this type of marketing to kids. Not great company. This is a no-brainer. We banned the marketing of alcohol and tobacco to kids, and it made a difference. Yet your kids still see 30,000 commercials a year for junk food. As a parent, you can’t compete with that kind of propaganda.

9.
Write to the FDA requesting that food labels be fixed to reflect the true quality of the food.
The “traffic light” method of green, yellow, and red that is used in other countries makes it simple to understand labels and choose food based on the science of how it affects your health. Green is healthy and can be eaten freely. Yellow should be eaten with caution and moderately. And red means eat at your own risk! Food label guidelines, created by the Food and Drug Administration, are heavily influenced by food industry lobbyists and are designed
to confuse consumers by making it unclear whether something is good or bad for you unless you have a PhD in nutrition science.

10.
Write to Congress to end the conflict of interest. Remove responsibility for food policy and dietary recommendations from the USDA.
They support agriculture, not health. It’s like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. These responsibilities should be turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services or a newly formed food agency that does not have the USDA’s inherent conflict of interest.

11.
Lobby Congress to tax soda and sugar-sweetened beverages.
They are the largest source of sugar calories in our diet and the ones most strongly linked by science to obesity and diabetes. The revenues from this tax could be funneled back into proven obesity-fighting programs for the poor and underserved. This strategy worked with alcohol and tobacco. And if the soda lobby thought this move would
not
have a significant impact on soda consumption, it would not spend over $20 million a year to fight it, or give $10 million to the City of Philadelphia to stop the law by supporting an obesity program at the Children’s Hospital.

12.
Contact your local zoning regulators and work together to support restrictions on access to sugar.
This can be done by limiting the number and density of convenience stores and fast-food outlets (improving the Retail Food Environment Index), especially in low-income neighborhoods and around schools, and providing incentives for grocery stores and farmers’ markets. There are programs now that double the value of food stamp dollars used at farmers’ markets. We could also institute age limits (such as a minimum age of eighteen) for the purchase of drinks with added sugar, just as we do for alcohol.

These are just starter ideas. I have written more about how we can all “Take Back Our Health” in
The Blood Sugar Solution
. And in the next few suggestions, you will learn more about what you can do at
home and in your community to personally influence social reform. You can also share your ideas at www.takebackourhealth.org.

While it hasn’t been proven that more parks and sidewalks lead to a skinnier population, we do know that your immediate environment plays a big role in your health. Remember Dan Buettner’s experiment in Minnesota, where he implemented changes in the environment that led to significant weight loss and health? Kids lost 10 percent of their body weight after eating in classrooms and hallways was prohibited. And the town lost 12,000 pounds by having residents agree to use ten-inch plates and having grocers put healthy foods at the checkout counters. Your environment
does
matter.

Imagine if your health bubble extended way beyond the boundaries of your own personal environment. Imagine if you could help build and create a world where healthy choices were not just available, but easy and
automatic
.

Here are just a few ways you can begin to change the infrastructure for health:

1.
Take back school lunchrooms.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which removes junk food from schools and supports access to fresh produce through farm-to-school networks, is a great start, but we need more—much more. For ideas on what you can do to get involved, I recommend watching the documentary
Two Angry Moms
or reading the companion book,
Lunch Wars
.

2.
Band together with other parents and rally your school administrators
to support “eat only in lunchroom” policies and the integration of nutrition and cooking skills into the curriculum (then think bigger and lobby your local politicians to support changes in zoning laws to prevent fast-food and junk-food retailers from operating near schools!). Andrea Ryan, the wife of Tim Ryan, the congressman from Ohio who wrote
A Mindful Nation
, is a fourth-grade teacher. She allows her kids to eat food in class only if it is a raw fruit or vegetable—so the kids demand that their parents buy them more fruits and vegetables. One teacher, one class, but this is something that is scalable to every school.

3.
Visit your local grocer and ask for healthier items.
Merchandisers will respond to the requests of their consumers, and if enough people start asking, they will catch on. One crusader I know goes around the grocery store moving the healthy stuff to shelves at eye level to give it better visual placement.

4.
Suggest healthy options to your favorite local restaurants.
The more these items are requested, the more likely they are to show up on the menu as everyday choices.

5.
Talk to your human resources department
about improving the food culture at your workplace by offering healthier alternatives in the lunchroom or vending machines, and during meetings or other company events.

6.
Work with administrators at your place of worship
to ensure that there are healthy foods and beverages at gatherings and events. You can also create fitness activities to do together at your place of worship; take a look at www.danielplan.com for more ideas and examples. You can also start the Daniel Plan at your place of worship. We have created a whole curriculum to make it easy to get started.