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.

Read the full piece on my Substack here.