Supermarket sleuth

Stalking the aisles of America's grocery stores, "What to Eat" nutritionist Marion Nestle tells you how to keep junk food from sneaking into your cart.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Advertising, Politics, Health, Obesity, Eating, Katharine Mieszkowski, Life, Food and Travel

Photo composite by Bob Watts/Salon

Marion Nestle

June 12, 2006 | If you've seen "Super Size Me," Morgan Spurlock's hilarious documentary about fast food, you've already met Marion Nestle. She's the only person in the movie who is able to offer a coherent definition of a calorie.

Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food science and public health at New York University, has long been a leading critic of the salty, fatty, sugary junk that passes for food in America, and especially the way it's hawked to kids. She blasts the U.S. government for allowing the food industry to determine public health policy on everything from the food pyramid to transfats. And her books, such as "Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health," have inspired such fear and trembling from Big Food that she's been smeared as a "diet scold" and, even more feverishly, as "one of the country's most hysterical anti-food-industry fanatics."

Nestle's new book, "What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating," brings her analysis of food politics into the grocery store, giving shoppers advice on what to buy and what to leave on the shelves. Armed with a notebook and calculator, Nestle spent a year in the field -- or, in this case, the produce, beverage, cereal and dairy aisles -- making observations about what's actually being sold. She came away stunned at the blizzard of choices offered up in the average Safeway or Kroger, and how easy it is for consumers to be bamboozled by marketing messages masquerading as nutritional data.

In "What to Eat," Nestle demystifies the American foodscape, exposing the ways that nutritional advice is tainted by food marketers and the diet industry. Readers will find there's much to be learned by taking a 611-page extended shopping trip with her. For starters, many foods with healthy reputations -- most yogurt and fruit drinks and many cereals, even those promoted as high-fiber or high-protein -- are loaded with sugars, and should be treated as dessert, not breakfast. Junk food is fortified and packaged to make it sound healthier than it is: As Nestle writes, "Vitamin-enriched sodas are still sodas. Organic gummi bears are still candy. Trans fat-free snack foods are still salty and full of rapidly absorbable carbohydrates." And, sorry, raw cookie-dough eaters; today's eggs are more likely to be contaminated with salmonella than they were just a few decades ago.

But there are lots of tasty morsels to savor in "What to Eat," too, which, as the title suggests, is actually a compendium of what to eat, not just what to avoid. Salon met with Nestle for lunch in her temporary office at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is a visiting professor this year. She split an enormous, delicious sandwich -- corn, carrot, avocado and cheese on whole-grain bread -- from a local cafe with this interviewer, while reflecting on how portion size has gotten out of control.

You begin with some simple health recommendations: eat less, exercise more and eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Why is the American food industry so at odds with those goals?

Because they don't want us eating less, of course. The American food supply produces 3,900 calories a day for every man, woman and child in the country. That's twice as much food as we need. So, if you're in the food business, you've got to figure out a way to sell it. The choices are to get people eating your product instead of somebody else's, to get people to eat more in general, or to raise prices. In that situation, obesity is collateral damage.

What are some strategies food companies use to make us eat more?

Larger portions. If you put a larger portion of food in front of somebody, they will eat more, even if they're not hungry, even if they're on a diet, even if they're a nutritionist. They're going to eat more. That overrides some kind of internal control.

Having food available is incentive to eat more -- just having it around. And in fact, there's research that shows the closer the food is to you physically, the more you'll eat of it.

As we've started to get food offered in more places, at more times, and in larger portions, there have been changes in society. All of a sudden it's OK to eat in bookstores, and in libraries and clothing stores -- places where there used to be signs that said don't bring food in here, because it would attract cockroaches, and get coffee on the clothes. Now, in most places, you're encouraged to eat, drink and be merry.

Many diets focus specifically on one supposedly bad ingredient -- like fat or carbs -- but don't tell people to eat less, and don't stress calories. Why do popular diets focus on what we eat, not how much we eat?

Nobody can understand calories -- at least most people can't. It's so much easier to think that if I just cut out this one ingredient, I'll lose weight. It's simple.

One of your beefs is that food manufacturers make all kinds of positive health claims about unhealthy foods.

They make no sense at all if you think about it for a moment. Here's a good one.

[Picks up a box of macaroni and cheese off a table in her office. Hands it to the interviewer.]

[Reading from the box] "Super Mac & Cheese pasta and sauce from Kraft. Excellent source of calcium. Good source of vitamin B, C, D and E. Good source of whole grains."

Now, is that not the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen?

"Helps kids build strong bones." That's the calcium and vitamin D.

So, if you eat that it's going to help kids have strong bones.

"Whole grains. Important for good health. Provides one half serving."

(Laughs.) Oh, dear. So, I'm going to have good health if I eat that, never mind how much salt or fat it has. And it's a "Sensible Solution." That Kraft's self-endorsement for its better-for-you food products.

It's macaroni and cheese, and it's not even high-quality cheese. If you use the classic preparation, it's nearly 400 calories. It's got 4.5 grams of saturated fat, which is a quarter of your daily allowance. It's got 600 milligrams of sodium. It has 25 percent of a day's allowance of sodium. It's processed up the wazoo. It's salty. I wouldn't call it a health food. But they're selling it as a health food.

So many things are being sold as health foods now by putting vitamins into junk foods. But aren't most Americans already getting all the vitamins they need?

There are people who have iron deficiencies and anemia, but vitamin deficiencies are not a major public health problem in this country. But, yes, there's the general feeling that when it comes to vitamins, more must be better.

So, if 100 percent of vitamin C is good, then 300 percent must be better?

It must be three times as good.

And that's not true?

There's not much evidence to support it.

So, how would you suggest shoppers navigate the supermarket?

I have these facetious rules. Always shop the periphery. Don't go into the center aisles. If you do go into the center aisles, don't buy anything with more than five ingredients. If you can't pronounce the ingredients on the package label, don't buy it. Don't buy anything with a cartoon on it. If you don't want your kids eating junk food, don't have it in the home.

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