Fixing Nutrition in FDA

What should we do about nutrition? First, completely redefine the government’s role. Second, should eat more fruits and vegetables that we have been manipulating since 1716. This started by crossing pollen and, more recently, by bombarding plants with radiation to create random mutations in the plant’s DNA. The results are the fruits and vegetables that we see in grocery stores today that some people refer to as “natural.”

Nope, nothing natural about them.

What’s more, as I wrote about in Fixing Food, nothing in nature, neither plants nor animals, evolved to be both safe and nutritious for us to eat. In fact, plants must protect themselves from predators, mostly insects. To do so, plants have evolved natural pesticides, but since these are not always efficient, we developed synthetic alternatives to support them. By weight, 99.99% of the pesticides we eat are of the naturally evolved variety. When we test our “natural” fruits and vegetables with the same rodent tests we use on everything else, about half of them appear to cause cancer. Feeding rodents food substances that are hundreds of times what we eat doesn’t tell us a lot about what causes cancer in humans.

The Real Driver Behind Food Choices

The food industry has been trying to improve food but can only go as far as what we, the consumers, allow them to do. We want food that looks good, tastes good, is convenient and doesn’t cost too much. In fact, taste and affordability are always the most important qualities necessary to sell food, nutrition is third, and environmental and social issues dead last. It’s easy to blame the food industry but, like every other industry in a free society, it is producing what people want to buy.

Think about fast food companies that tried to sell healthy foods like Taco Bell’s Seafood Salad, Burger King’s low-calorie Satisfries and McDonald’s McSalad Shakers and Mclean Deluxe burger.

Tried and rejected.

Go to most supermarkets and there will be a whole section with fruits and vegetables, seafood that can be grilled, kefir, steel-cut oatmeal, beans, lentils, and green vegetables. If people wanted to eat nothing but healthy foods, and eat them in moderation, the choices are there now. Not surprisingly, there are also many very tasty foods with lots of saturated fat, sugar, sodium, and refined grains.

Why Dietary Guidelines Are Failing Us

Our current approach is to tell people what they should and should not eat in the federal Dietary Guidelines; a 1950s conception of a dinner plate should look, i.e., MyPlate; and complex labels containing lists of ingredients and nutrients in processed food.

This approach is not working.

Innovations That Could Transform Nutrition

But we have new tools in our food toolkit. For example, CRISPR has allowed us to go beyond pairing individual plants or blasting them with radiation and precisely editing plants to taste better containing exactly the nutrients we want. A new version of CRISPR is allowing us to tune plants in a more nuanced way to make, for example, seedless blackberries and develop crops more resilient to climate change. Some compounds are being developed for farms to keep soils healthy by enabling them to keep nitrogen in the soil. Biomass fermentation can produce foods with “lower cholesterol, fat, and sugar levels and higher fiber content.”

In addition, wearable biosensors will help us track what we eat. Wearable technologies can also track every aspect of our health and suggest either home recipes or what we should choose in restaurants, including portion size.

Making Government a Partner, Not a Barrier

What will be important in all these new technologies will be for government to be an aid rather than an obstacle. It’s time to stop trying to educate consumers on the intricacies of nutrition and relying on biased epidemiological studies and meaningless high dose rodent studies.

For nutrition, it's time to put away the quill pens and foolscap, top-down regulation, and government-knows-best advice. Let’s move to new methods of unbiased research involving individual health and diet monitoring, big data, AI, machine learning, and new methods of creating foods with the necessary macro and micronutrients.

Government can play a role in helping to validate biomarkers for health endpoints and using police powers to go after obvious frauds. This is a big, old, self-reenforcing system and we will not be able to move to a healthier society until we break it up.