Food for thought notes

Coleman, V. (2000). Food for thought. Barnstaple, Devon: European Medical Journal.

page 43

I believe that it will very soon be difficult (if not impossible) to obtain good quality food which contains the necessary basic ingredients for healthy living. It is already difficult to buy decent food. Supermarkets are very patchy suppliers of organic foods.

The food industry has recently introduced a number of techniques which are clearly not going to go away.

Moreover, there is, I believe, a very real chance that the quality of organic food will deteriorate dramatically in the next year or two. The American food Goliaths are keen to dilute the meaning of the phrase ‘organic food’ and, sooner or later, I believe that they will succeed.

Unless you grow your own food the chances are that within a few years the only food available (whether or not it is labelled as ‘organic’) will contain a rich mixture of hormones, chemicals, drug residues and other possible carcinogens.

Consider the actual truth behind "health/healthy" foods. 

page 73

Become a cynic when reading food advertisements and food labels. Over the last few years the food industry has managed to devalue the word ‘natural’ so that it has become virtually meaningless. For example, the phrase ‘only natural ingredients’ is sometimes used to describe foods which are stuffed with additives if those additives are chemicals that occur naturally, or synthetic versions of chemicals which occur naturally.

page 166

Inevitably, perhaps, the food industry’s immediate, knee - jerk response to this discovery was to start selling consumers bran and fibre supplements. Instead of encouraging people to buy more natural foods, full of natural fibre, the massive, international industry continued to sell packaged foods from which the fibre had been removed - but added a new range of foods which had been artificially enriched with fibre and many new varieties of fibre supplements. It was a trick of stupefying audacity, but it worked: all around the globe, in so called developed countries, people who regarded themselves as educated and intelligent consumers sought to balance their fibre deprived diets by purchasing and swallowing these artificial fibre supplements. Having paid the food industry to take the essential fibre out of their food they then paid the industry a second time to buy the fibre back.

page 231

Finding out exactly what you shouldn’t eat isn’t quite so easy. The truth is shrouded in mystery and confusion - much of created, quite deliberately, on behalf of vested interests, by lobbyists, advertising agencies and public relations groups.

The far reaching tentacles of the big food companies are as powerful as those of the big drug companies. Finding the truth is made particularly difficult by the fact that many newspapers, magazines and journals readily publish material they are given by companies with products to sell.

^ Influence of media upon consumers and sales of food.

page 258

The slimming ‘industry’ is the biggest and most profitable part of the healthcare industry and many companies and individuals have made fortunes out of the twin facts that losing weight is harder than putting it on and that most would-be slimmers are on the constant look out for an easy, quick and painless way to lose weight. Everyone, it sometimes seems, wants to lose weight, but no one wants to have to work at it.

Weight watchers, slimming world, etc. Research these companies and their appeal.