The processed food battlefield

31. July 2007 William Davis (4)
If you have any remaining doubts that the processed food industry is a cutthroat, go-for-the-jugular, organized effort to extract every possible penny from your pocket, even at the expense of health, take a gander at a quote from Marion Nestle's wonderful book, Food Politics.

In Nestle's description on how food conglomerate, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), conspired to fix prices on some basic agricultural compounds, she quotes an ADM executive captured on videotape and presented in court:

"We have a saying at this company . . . our competitors are our friends and our customers are our enemies."

In other words, ADM's competitors help establish what prices should be charged for basic foodstuffs, while its customers are the ones to do battle with.

Food is a necessary commodity. You and I only need so much of it. So how does a 40 billion dollar food manufacturer extract greater and greater profits and grow their market? Motivate people to eat more. It's that simple.

Eat less? Are you kidding? Eat spinach, green peppers, beets, and other low-margin products? Get real.

Why not take 8 cents worth of wheat flour, add some sugar, food coloring, and some other enticing flavorings like high fructose corn syrup? Put it all in a cleverly illustrated package, maybe even develop an entire story line about the product, complete with clever slogans and songs and . . . ouila! You now have a food that sells for many, many times its intrinsic value.

How to make the health nuts happy? Easy: Add some fiber. Now it's healthy! And it's now part of a "balanced diet".

What if it's full of corn starch, wheat flour, and sugar of the sort that make HDL cholesterols plummet, fan the flames of small LDL, increase inflammatory measures like C-reactive protein, push people closer and closer to diabetes, and make them fat? Then be sure it's low in saturated fat! It might even qualify as "Heart Healthy" by the American Heart Association!

Processed foods have no role in the Track Your Plaque program. If you want to see your CT heart scan score skyrocket, go to your grocery store and stray into the aisles outside of the produce aisle.

But stick to the produce aisle and watch your wallet grow, your health improve, your appetite shrink, all while food processor profits plummet.
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Comments (4) -

  • JT

    7/31/2007 12:02:00 PM |

    Personally, I'd like for sugar & starch to be burned as fuel for cars!  

    Oh, I remember the ADM investigations.  That was a strange case.  Mark Whitaker I believe was the name of the executive that provided information to the FBI.  What was so odd is that Mark was also in on the bribery and I guess later he committed a fake suicide.  Many called him psychotic and even the FBI kept an arms length from him even though he was their prime informant.  Mark ended up serving time in jail, I believe.      

    Dr. Davis, you have mentioned that you enjoy reading the "inside" scoop on the health business.  At one time Mark was considered the darling of ADM.  I believe he was the youngest executive to ever work at the company.  One of his larger accomplishments at ADM was to start the natural vitamin E/ sterol production plant.  Months leading up to the formal announcement that ADM was entering the natural E market - 2 or 3 nation wide scientific reports came out in the press highlighting how much better natural E was compared to synthetic E.  As I was told, that wasn't a coincidence.

  • Dr. Davis

    7/31/2007 12:55:00 PM |

    Hi, JT--

    Interesting.

    It often seems that the most benign things on the commercial side of health have a dark side.

    I'm currently working on a book that details the dark side of healthcare, though not the food manufacturing industry. No shortage of material here!

  • Stan

    7/31/2007 4:21:00 PM |

    You are right!  But I think, there is a lot more to food marketing disinformation than just fiber, corn and starch.   Just at the time when the American and European food industry learned how to make cheap abundant vegetable oils sometime between the 1930-ties to 60-ties, articles begun appear in the popular press as if by magic, denouncing animal fat and saturated fats as supposedly unhealthy.  Not only that turned out to be a marketing masterstroke getting rid of the main competitors, that is farmer's butter and lard, but it permitted a ban on imported tropical oils as saturated.  

    It's amazing that most people including probably a majority of medical doctors fell for this deception and did not notice that there was and still is absolutely zero scientific evidence behind all that scare!  The media "fact" became the medical "fact".

    Regards,
    Stan (Heretic)

  • JT

    7/31/2007 8:55:00 PM |

    So you just couldn't be satisfied with revolutionizing the cardiac industry?  Now you're after the whole apple cart! : )

    Best of luck with the new book.  Hope you become the Upton Sinclair of the medical care business.  

    as a side note, I hear Hollywood is in the process of making a movie about Mark Whitacre and ADM.  I'm looking forward to seeing it.

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Super-carbohydrate

Super-carbohydrate

22. May 2010 William Davis (18)
Wheat starches are composed of polymers (repeating chains) of the sugar, glucose. 75% of wheat carbohydrate is the chain of branching glucose units, amylopectin, and 25% is the linear chain of glucose units, amylose.

Both amylopectin and amylose are digested by the salivary and stomach enzyme, amylase, in the human gastrointestinal tract. Amylopectin is more efficiently digested to glucose, while amylose is less efficiently digested, some of it making its way to the colon undigested.

Amylopectin is therefore the “complex carbohydrate” in wheat that is most closely linked to its blood sugar-increasing effect. But not all amylopectin is created equal. The structure of amylopectin varies depending on its source, differing in its branching structure and thereby efficiency of amylase accessibility.

Legumes like kidney beans contain amylopectin C, the least digestible—hence the gas characteristic of beans, since undigested amylopectin fragments make their way to the colon, whereupon colonic bacteria feast on the undigested starches and generate gas, making the sugars unavailable for you to absorb.

Amylopectin B is the form found in bananas and potatoes and, while more digestible than bean amylopectin C, still resists digestion to some degree.

The most digestible is amylopectin A, the form found in wheat. Because it is the most readily digested by amylase, it is the form that most enthusiastically increases blood sugar. This explains why, gram for gram, wheat increases blood sugar to a much greater degree than, say, chickpeas.

The amylopectin A of wheat products, “complex” or no, might be regarded as a super-carbohydrate, a form of highly digestible carbohydrate that is more efficiently converted to blood sugar than nearly all other carbohydrate foods.
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Comments (18) -

  • Jim Purdy

    5/22/2010 3:30:00 PM |

    QUOTE:
    "... gram for gram, wheat increases blood sugar to a much greater degree than, say, chickpeas. "

    Well, that ain't good.

  • David

    5/22/2010 4:21:52 PM |

    I've really enjoyed these last couple of posts about wheat. Very informative and accessible. Thanks for taking the time to make this kind of info available to the wider audience.

    David

  • Anonymous

    5/22/2010 5:12:17 PM |

    fascinating

  • pjnoir

    5/22/2010 8:48:14 PM |

    WOW- a classic lose-lose. 25% remains in your colon, to become a bacteria feast and the rest (75%) increases blood sugar and insulin production to store it as a fat cell.  hmmmmm, thank goodness for science, we may save ourselves.

  • Anonymous

    5/22/2010 10:15:53 PM |

    Dr. Davis,

    While not on a directly related note, do you have any general feelings on moderate consumption of buckwheat as a carbohydrate source? From what I have read, this "pseudo" grain seems to be far less problematic than true grains. It would still not give most folks a license to consume it ad libitum, but I am curious if you'd consider this a decent choice in controlled amounts (with the actual amount varying by context and the overall health of the person in question).

    -Dave Balon

  • Mike

    5/22/2010 10:37:12 PM |

    Excellent explaination, Dr Davis.

  • Anonymous

    5/23/2010 1:55:46 AM |

    I'm really enjoying your posts about wheat.  Very interesting.  Thanks

  • Apolloswabbie

    5/23/2010 3:27:45 PM |

    Thank you Dr. D

  • Jill

    5/24/2010 3:04:47 PM |

    Dear Heart Scan Blog,

    I am a student at the  University of Rochester working on an internship project in conjunction with RateADrug.com to collect primary user data about side effects and benefits from commonly used treatments for Atherosclerosis & Arterial Disease.  The goal is to build a large, public access database of unbiased, anecdotal data about Atherosclerosis & Arterial Disease treatments.

    We want to let both patients and practitioners know about how they can participate in or benefit from the project.  Users can add their experiences with a treatment and learn more about how the treatment is affecting them by taking a short, confidential survey. They can also use RateADrug to compare aggregate data for different Atherosclerosis & Arterial Disease treatments- both conventional and alternative (http://www.rateadrug.com/Atherosclerosis-and-Arterial-Disease-symptoms-feedback.aspx) - and forward the results of their own surveys to their doctors or family members.

    Rateadrug is an independent data gathering and information website that does not accept funding or advertisement from drug companies.

    Would it be possible for you to make this information available to your viewers so they can help us collect important data on Atherosclerosis & Arterial Disease treatments?

    Thank you in advance. I'd be happy to speak with you if you have any questions or comments.

    University of Rochester
    www.RateADrug.com student intern
    jillian@radpprep2.com

  • Dr. William Davis

    5/24/2010 10:28:41 PM |

    Hi, Paul--

    Yes, indeed. The data relating high-carbohydrate intake with multiple forms of cancer is getting very scary.

  • Anonymous

    5/25/2010 4:18:17 AM |

    Wow, I am a long time fan of heartscanblog, but Paul's citation is the most misleading EVER.   The authors found that carbs were associated with pancreatic cancer only in the FIRST FOUR years of follow-up, whereas fat and saturated fat were associated with pancreatic cancer during follow-up GREATER than four years.  Since pancreatic cancer takes years to develop, the authors conclude that carbohydrates are NOT CAUSAL to pancreatic cancer - fat may be.

  • DrStrange

    5/25/2010 2:43:32 PM |

    "The data relating high-carbohydrate intake with multiple forms of cancer is getting very scary."

    I would think at least in part from the higher blood sugars.  Much less problematic w/ whole, intact grains (boiled vs ground into flour and refined (and then higher temp. baked or fried)!

  • discombobulated

    5/25/2010 7:50:36 PM |

    I love your blog.  We have switched out diets to something much closer to what you recommend due to the fact that my husband's psoriasis gets so much better if he avoids wheat,potatoes, corn, refined sugars, and dairy.  We figure it's better than using steroids for the problem.  We also have one son who has been biopsied for celiac after is blood work and we were told he doesn't have the correct atrophy but does have a damaged intestine.  

    So we are committed to eating this way.  But one thing I have wondered about is if you feel that carb blockers work for blocking starch.  There are times when I would kill for a baked potato but try not to because it starts a negative cycle.  And now I know that it's not so hot for my heart either.  

    This post made me wonder if there isn't some merit in them.

  • Breast Augmentation Los Angeles

    5/26/2010 6:20:52 PM |

    Thanks for discussing this.I thought whet is sort of better than the white bread for the diabetic and the heart patients.

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  • Mary Wier

    7/10/2012 8:38:03 AM |

    Bill and I found our Wheatbelly book and have been off gluten for 9 months, it was hard at first but we now
    feel so different, Bill's blood sugar dropped 25 points, and we look at all our food so differently now!
    The display of wheat rolls and pastry at our buffet looks more and more like hidden poison.
    We are off sugar, too it is so tempting but our body says, Thank you Dr. Davis!

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