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"If children have healthy foods available, they’ll eat healthy foods. If they have unhealthy foods available, they’ll eat those … Animals will do the same thing when put in a cage.”
So says Kelly Brownell, a long-time member of the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s scientific advisory board, who has co-authored numerous articles with CSPI co-founder Michael Jacobson. CSPI believes that the American people act like animals who have to be poked and prodded—or scared, taxed, and restricted—into eating a healthy diet. It’s no surprise that CSPI’s public-policy arm selected the motto “Because it takes more than willpower.”
Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, argues that CSPI’s “obsession” with a low-fat diet reflects “a paternalistic idea that the public is not smart enough to distinguish between types of fat.” Food critic Robert Shoffner puts it more directly when he describes CSPI’s approach this way: “People are children and have to be protected by Big Brother or Big Nanny from the awful free-market predators ... That’s what drives these people—a desire for control of other people’s lives.”
In addition to the desire to control people’s lives, CSPI is motivated by at least three distinct goals: making you afraid of your food, taking the pleasure out of eating, and (of course) making money.
CSPI wants to scare you about your food
Whenever an activist-inspired food scare is afoot, CSPI takes to the airwaves, exaggerating the risks and calling for a complete overhaul of America’s food safety systems. When Great Britain was slaughtering its cattle at the height of the mad cow disease scare, CSPI trumpeted the grossly misleading claim that the animals are “better protected from ‘Mad Cow Disease’ than people.”
CSPI’s everyday language about normal foods like sandwiches and milk is also intended to scare you about your food. Here’s Jacob Sullum in Reason magazine describing CSPI’s “bottom line” on many foods:
The low-down on pizza with extra cheese: “Never order an extra-cheese pizza.” Likewise fried mozzarella sticks (“Just say no”), buffalo wings (“Order something else”), crispy orange beef (ditto), beef and cheese nachos (“Order just about anything else”), a gyro (“There’s no way to make this a healthful choice”), a mushroom cheeseburger (“Forget about this one!”), a fried whole onion (“a bomb”), a milk shake (“Skip it”), the Cheesecake Factory’s carrot cake (“the worst dessert on the menu”), and cheese fries with ranch dressing (“worse than anything we’ve ever analyzed”).
Appearing on Good Morning America to promote a report condemning ice cream, Jacobson told viewers never to indulge. “Just know that you’re going to kill yourself,” he said.
Is there anything CSPI would allow us to eat? At least fruits and vegetables, right? “Naturally, you should eat lots of them, because they’re good for you,” Sullum writes in the voice of CSPI. “Just keep in mind that they may be killing you.” CSPI can’t help itself from warning about the risk of cancer from all those pesticides on fruits and vegetables—even though they quietly acknowledge that those risks are probably nonexistent.
Regardless of the facts, CSPI’s message is: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
CSPI wants to take the pleasure out of eating
If CSPI can’t scare you away from eating your favorite foods, at least it can strip all the pleasure out of the experience. “Michael Jacobson has a mission in life,” writes Matt Marshall of the Chicago Sun Times: “To take the joy out of America’s favorite munchies, from burgers to pasta to popcorn.” A recent editorial in the Columbus Dispatch reiterates the point, calling CSPI “the nation’s mirthless nanny about food and drink.”
CSPI’s nightmare, of course, is Halloween. The group advises that instead of giving children treats, “you could always hand out low-fat granola bars—and toothbrushes.”
“Every time you reach for candy,” CSPI laments, “you’ve missed an opportunity to eat fruits, vegetables, or other foods that might reduce your risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, and obesity.” The message: Make sure that when you’re chewing on that doughnut, you think to yourself: “I’m a bad person for eating this. I’m slowly killing myself.”
Each issue of CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter, which the group claims has 800,000 subscribers, includes a section called “food porn,” designed to scare people away from eating targeted items. The number of products that CSPI cautions against is staggering, and includes milk, fruit juice, and lettuce. No food, in other words, is guilt free. And some are so bad that CSPI advises readers to call the company to complain.
CSPI is driven by a “suspicion of pleasure without pain, of enjoyment unencumbered by fear,” argues Sullum. “That suspicion,” he concludes, “is the thread that runs through CSPI’s uneasiness about artificial sweeteners and caffeine, its dire warnings about fat and salt, its campaign against the fat substitute olestra, its hysteria about acrylamide in French fries, its discomfort with food irradiation, its condemnation of the imitation-meat product Quorn, and its opposition to alcohol consumption as a way of preventing heart disease.” (For the lowdown on many of these fears, see CSPI’s “Blackeye.”)
CSPI wants to make money
CSPI gets over 70 percent of its income from subscriptions to its monthly Nutrition Action Healthletter. Accordingly, much of what it promotes as “science” is often geared more toward selling subscriptions than providing wise counsel. And CSPI has learned that you don’t sell subscriptions with a calm, reasoned approach to nutrition.
In fact, the much calmer and much more reasonable Tufts University Nutrition Navigator has written that much of Healthletter’s advice “falls outside the realm of generally accepted nutrition guidelines and recommendations.” CSPI’s newsletter “makes sweeping damnations of brand-name foods,” notes Pittsburgh Post-Gazette food writer Nancy Anderson. It is “opinionated, readable, and not to be taken seriously.”
