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Food and Health Fact #111
Fact #111: Changes in the American eating environment
By Matthew Rees
Food and Health Fact #111: Changes in the American eating environment
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This week's "food for thought" excerpt comes from Resetting the Table: Straight Talk about the Food We Grow and Eat (2021), by Robert Paarlberg.
"American children in the 1970s enjoyed, on average, just a single snack every day. By 2012 three snacks daily was the norm, adding almost two hundred calories to the daily diet. Snacking has now become nearly a $90 billion industry in the United States, and it continues growing at a 3 percent annual rate. . . . [T]his risk to dietary health did not come from America's farms. What changed was the eating environment, which became a swamp of affordable food products surrounding us all day long. The products were designed by corporate scientists to be irresistible, and they have been relentlessly promoted by food manufacturing companies, food retail stores, and large restaurant chains. It is probably our nature to overeat when surrounded by such an abundance of tasty and affordable food, but corporate strategies ruthlessly exploit this human weakness. Food products laden with sugar, salt, and fat are now deliberately formulated to ensure eaters will crave them; then they are promoted as innocent fun and placed within easy reach, pushing personal consumption into the danger zone."
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