Soit donc que vous mangiez, soit que vous buviez, soit que vous fassiez quelque autre chose, faites tout pour la gloire de Dieu. Paul (1 Corinthiens 10: 31)
Prepackaged and ready-to-eat breakfast cereals began with the American temperance movement in the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, the Reverend Sylvester Graham preached the virtues of a vegetarian diet to his congregation and in particular the importance of wholemeal flour. Meat-eating, he said, excited the carnal passions. Granula considered the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, was developed from his ‘Graham flour’ by one of his followers, James Caleb Jackson, for patients at the latter’s water cure resort. It was a baked lump of slow-cooked wheat and water that was said to be hard as rock and had to be broken up and soaked overnight to be edible. It was sold at ten times the cost of its ingredients. The business motive for proselytizing by breakfast cereal was established. Following on from Jackson, the Seventh Day Adventists took up the mission begun by Graham. A colony of them had set up in a small town called Battle Creek near the American Great Lakes in Michigan. There they established the Western Health Reform Institute in 1866 to cure hog guzzling and to their mind degenerate Americans of their dyspepsia and vices. John Harvey Kellogg turned it into the famous Battle Creek Sanatarium, a curious but money-spinning mix of health spa, holiday camp and experimental hospital. Kellogg, a sort of early cross between Billy Graham and Gillian McKeith, set about devising cures for what he believed were the common ills of the day, in particular constipation and masturbation. In Kellogg’s mind the two were closely linked, the common cause being a lack of fibre, both dietary and moral. As well as prescribing daily cold water baths, exercise drills, and unorthodox medical interventions, creating health-giving foods for patients was a major preoccupation. Kellogg, his wife and his younger brother William Keith experimented in the Sanatarium kitchen to produce an easily digested form of cereal. They came up with their own highly profitable Granula, but were promptly sued by Jackson, the original maker of Granula, and had to change the name to Granola. Victorian prudery and religion may have been at the root of processed cereal development, but parables about camels and eyes of needles did not discourage any of these evangelicals from seeing the commercial advantage and using the law to protect their business interests. Around this time an entrepreneur called Henry Perky had also invented a way of passing steamed wheat through rollers, one grooved and one smooth, to form strands that could be pressed into biscuits to make the first shredded wheat. JH Kellogg experimented further with his team and eventually they found a way of rolling cooked wheat to make flakes which could then be baked. Cornflakes followed when the Kelloggs worked out how to use cheap American corn instead of wheat, although initially they had problems keeping them crisp and preventing them from going rancid. This great leap forward is of a piece with other major developments in the industrialization of our diets: it is usually the combination of technological advances and the right economic conditions that lead to radical changes in what we eat. It was a chronically dyspeptic businessman and former patient of Kellogg’s at the Sanatarium who unleashed the power of marketing on breakfast. Charles Post set up the rival La Vita Inn in Battle Creek and developed his own versions of precooked cereals. He distributed them with such encouraging tracts as The Road to Wellville. ‘The sunshine that makes a business plant grow is advertizing,’ he declared. He placed ads for his cereals in papers with paid-for testimonials from apparently genuine happy eaters. He also cheerfully invented diseases which his products could cure. His Grape Nuts were miraculously not only ‘brain food’ but could also cure consumption and malaria, and were even, despite their enamel-cracking hardness, said to be an antidote to loose teeth. By 1903 Battle Creek had turned into a cereal Klondike. At one point there were over 100 cereal factories operating in the town to satisfy the new craze, many making fabulously exaggerated claims about the health benefits of their products. This symbiotic relationship between sales, health claims and the promotion of packaged breakfast cereals has continued ever since. Nor was it a coincidence that this particular Klondike sprang up in the American Mid-West, whose vast tracts of virgin land had been recently opened up by settlers and turned over to the agricultural production that powered US development. The Kelloggs had tried unsuccessfully to protect their flaking process with patents. When WK saw how much others were making from the new foods, he launched his own advertizing campaign, giving away free samples and putting ads in newspapers. The road to nutritional corruption opened up early. The Kellogg brothers argued over whether to make the cereals more palatable by adding sugar – the addition was anathema to John who saw sugar as an adulterant and a scourge, but William reckoned it was needed to stop the products tasting like ‘horse-food’. WK won. (…) Worries about the nutritional value of such highly processed grains surfaced early. Post’s company was one of the first to begin the heavy duty pre-sweetening of cereals with sugar coating in the late 1940s. The sales were enviable. The Kellogg company however held back, according to interviews with former employees in Cerealizing America, the highly entertaining account of cereal history by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford. The charitable Kellogg Foundation which had been set up by then to promote children’s health and education was a major shareholder and was concerned that flogging sugar-coatings to the young might not be compatible with its purpose. Many of the health benefits claimed for breakfast cereals depended on fortification rather than micronutrients from the raw ingredients, most of which were either destroyed by the process or stripped away before it. The earliest fortification was with vitamin D, the so-called sunshine vitamin, and acted as a marketing tool. Today a new wave of fortification is coming, and once again its principal purpose is marketing. Inulin, a form of fibre from plants, known to the food industry until recently as a cheap bulking agent thanks to its ability to retain water and mimic the mouthfeel of fats, is now added as a ‘prebiotic’. They have coined this word for it because it resists digestion in the upper gastrointestinal tract and reaches the large intestine almost intact where it is fermented by bacteria, encouraging the production of friendly microflora, which the industry markets too, as probiotics. The inulin, in other words, does what the fibre naturally occurring in whole grains would do if it hadn’t been stripped out by over processing. Companies are also looking at adding omega-3 fatty acids such as DHA. (Where my cat food goes, breakfast cereals follow.) There are technical difficulties with this. Since the DHA tends to come from fish, it makes things taste fishy, and its flavour has to be masked with other additives. That processed cereals had become little more than sugary junk with milk and vitamin pills added, was an accusation made as long ago as the 1970s. A US congressional hearing in 1970 was told by an adviser to President Nixon on nutrition, Robert Choate, that the majority of breakfast cereals ‘fatten but do little to prevent malnutrition’. Choate was outraged at the aggressive targeting of children in breakfast cereal advertizing. He analysed sixty well-known cereal brands for nutritional quality and concluded that two thirds of them offered ’empty calories, a term thus far applied to alcohol and sugar’. Rats fed a diet of ground-up cereal boxes with sugar, milk and raisins were healthier than rats fed the cereals themselves, he testified to senators. Battle Creek today is a small backwater in Michigan three hours drive from Chicago. There is not much sign now of the cereal gold rush that changed the British palate, and the flake factories working day and night have mostly gone. But the legacy lives on. In their place alongside Kellogg airport and the Kellogg Foundation is Kellogg’s Cereal City. Built in the shape of an old American grain store, it is a museum testament to the power of marketing that so maddened Choate. Walking through the collection I too was struck by how much our breakfast today is the child of advertizing. Trading on our insecurity about health, manipulating our emotions and selling to us through health professionals has always been part of the great puff. The antique cardboard boxes on show underline how from the first breakfast cereals sold not just a meal but a way of life: Power, Vim, Vigor, Korn Kinks and Climax cereal are among the early brand names. One of my favourite sections of the museum was the cabinet of boxes and pamphlets recording the original health claims that anticipate today’s persuasive messages. ‘Keeps the blood cool!’ ‘Makes red blood redder!’ There were the cereals that echoed today’s claims for prebiotics, ‘Will correct stomach troubles!’ or indeed the claims on my cat food, ‘The most scientific food in the world!’ Getting children hooked, making them associate breakfast cereal with fun and entertainment, blurring the lines between advertizing and programmes, exploiting new media – today it is the internet and viral marketing – was one of the main aims of competing manufacturers from the early days, as the museum displays show, and a crucial part in conquering the British breakfast. Kellogg’s sponsored a children’s programme called ‘The Singing Lady’. (…) The museum records how giveaway toys were being used by then too, to attract children’s loyalty and to encourage early pester power and repeat purchases. Cereal advertizing likewise helped shape early television. A chance meeting on a train in 1949 between the then chairman of Kellogg’s and an advertizing man called Leo Burnett led to a working relationship that both transformed the cereal market and made the mould for TV ads. Burnett used ‘motivational research’ to work out how to appeal to women and children with different kinds of packaging. Subliminal marketing was born. With his help Kellogg’s broadcast the first colour TV programmes and commercials for children. The result was that by the mid 1950s the company had captured nearly half the rapidly expanding US processed cereal market and was in a prime position to build its empire in Europe using the same methods. (…) The industry is adamant that its products are a healthy way to start the day, and has recruited Professor Tom Sanders, head of the nutrition department at King’s College London, to defend ‘breakfast cereals served with semi-skimmed milk’ as ‘low energy meals that provide about one fifth of the micronutrients of children’. However, a survey published by the independent consumer watchdog Which? called ‘Cereal Reoffenders’ took a rather different view. When it analysed 275 big-name breakfast cereals from leading manufacturers on sale in UK supermarkets in 2006 it found that 75 per cent of them had high levels of sugar, while almost a fifth had high levels of salt, according to criteria drawn up by the food standards agency for its traffic light nutritional labels. Nearly 90 per cent of those targeted at children were high in sugar, 13 per cent were high in salt, and 10 per cent were high in saturated fat. Several cereals making claims to be good for you got a red light too. All Bran was high in salt; Special K got a red for sugar and salt. Some high fibre bran cereals were giving you more salt per serving than a bag of crisps. (Some of these may have since been reformulated.) Felicity Lawrence
The dried-cereal industry had its roots in Battle Creek, Michigan, and the health-food movement of the late nineteenth century. The pioneers were John Harvey Kellogg, a physician who was a follower of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and his competitor and former patient, C. W. Post. Both operated what they called « sanitoriums » for the well-heeled dyspeptic,* and both believed that the path to health and happiness ran through the digestive tract. As Kellogg would say, « The causes of indigestion are responsible for more deaths than all other causes combined. » The idea of a breakfast flake that would aid digestion supposedly came to Kellogg in a midnight revelation, and he set to work on it the following morning. Post beat him to it, though, with his Grape Nuts, which by 1900 had earned him what was then the single largest, fastest legitimate fortune in America. Post Grape Nuts were originally made with molasses and maltose from barley flour, but no cane or beet sugar. Kellogg’s first cornflakes were sugar-free as well. But Kellogg had put his younger brother, W.K., in charge of the development progress, and while the elder Kellogg was away in Europe in 1902, W.K. added sugar to the toasted cornflakes to improve the taste and the flaking process. John Harvey was said to be outraged when he returned – « he felt that sugar was unhealthy and argued vehemently against using it, » as the story is told in the 1995 history Cerealizing America. Consumers disagreed, though, and the sugar – a relatively trivial amount – stayed. Two years later, when Quaker Oats gave away a truly sugar-coated cereal at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, the company considered it candy, as did their customers, and chose not to market it, on the assumption that « America’s sweet tooth was a passing fad. » This turned out to be not quite correct. It took 35 years for dried cereals, a health food, to begin the successful transformation into sugar-coated cereals, a hugely profitable breakfast candy. The process began with an industry outsider – Jim Rex, a Philadelphia heating-equipment salesman – and a line of thinking that seems almost incomprehensible in the context of the anti-sugar sentiments of today. As told in Cerealizing America, Rex was sitting at breakfast one day watching his children ladle spoonfuls of sugar atop their puffed-wheat cereal. « Sickened by the sugary excess, Rex began to think of ways he could get his kids to eat their cereal without plunging into the sugar bowl. The solution came to him in a flash of inspiration. Why not create a cereal ‘already sugar’d.' » The result, Ranger Joe, was the first sugar-coated, presweetened cereal sold in America. By then, Post Cereals was already planning to roll out a competitor, Sugar Crisp, nationwide. Post then began the trend of rationalizing how a company positioned as a producer of health foods could justify selling a cereal coated in sugar. Echoing the logic of Jim Rex, Post executives would argue that presweetened cereal actually contained less sugar than what children would add on their own. By adding sugar, Post was merely « trading off sugar carbohydrates for grain carbohydrates and sugar and starch are metabolized in exactly the same way. » Biochemists had already demonstrated that this was untrue, but it was not widely known. Either way, Post argued that « the nutritional value of the product » remained unchanged, with sugar calories replacing those from cereal grains. Sugar Crisp (now called Golden Crisp) sold spectacularly well, forcing the rest of the industry to play catch-up. Kellogg’s set out to produce a sugar-coated version of its iconic cornflakes as if « it was their salvation, » releasing Sugar Frosted Flakes in 1952 and Sugar Smacks, a direct competitor to Post’s Sugar Crisp, a year later. Kellogg’s failed to produce a sugar-coated oat cereal and turned to chocolate instead. The company logic, again guided by nutritionists, was that « all this sweetness is not the best for children, [and] that bittersweet chocolate was good and healthy and it wouldn’t be harmful to them. » The result was Cocoa Krispies. When the first, bittersweet-flavored version didn’t sell, the company added even more sugar. « The new cereal, » as one Kellogg’s salesman put it, « was a dietary flop, and a sales bonanza. » General Mills executives worried about the « possible dietary effects » of sugar-coated cereals, and its in-house nutritionist delayed the company’s entry into the presweetened market for years, but eventually they were overruled. The marketing team at General Mills argued that if the company didn’t compete, it wouldn’t survive. In 1953, General Mills released Sugar Smiles, a mixture of Wheaties and sugar-frosted Kix; by 1956, they had released three more sugar-coated cereals – Sugar Jets, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs. Over the next twenty years, the cereal industry would create dozens of sugar-coated cereals, some with half their calories derived from sugar. The greatest advertising minds in the country would not only create animated characters to sell the cereals to children – Tony the Tiger, Mr. MaGoo, Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear, Sugar Bear and Linus the Lionhearted, the Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle – but give them entire Saturday-morning television shows dedicated to the task of doing so. These companies would spend enormous sums marketing each cereal – six hundred million dollars total in a single year by the late 1960s, when the consumer advocate Ralph Nader took on the industry. Industry executives, bolstered by nutritionists – most famously, Fred Stare, founder and director of the nutrition department at Harvard – would justify the sale of sugar-coated cereals as a means to get kids to drink milk, or as part of a « healthy breakfast. » The magazine Consumer Reports may have captured this logic perfectly in 1986 when it claimed, « Eating any of the cereals would certainly provide better nutrition than eating no breakfast at all. » Gary Taubes
6 centenaires à Clapiers, pour un village d’un peu plus de 5.000 habitants, ce n’est pas commun. Cette particularité est due au Foyer du Romarin, une maison de retraite créée en 1974 sur les hauteurs de Clapiers, à l’ombre séculaire des pins d’Alep. (…) Le Foyer du Romarin a connu en outre deux hauts faits : tout d’abord le mariage des « Plus vieux mariés du Monde », dont l’histoire a fait les délices des télévisions du monde entier, tant il n’y a pas d’âge pour l’amour, ensuite, l’hébergement de la doyenne du Languedoc-Roussillon, Marie Combes, décédée en février 2005 à l’âge de 109 ans et 4 mois, la seule centenaire du Foyer des Romarins à l’époque. Montpellier villages
Although their religious beliefs varied, having a strong belief in God was another trait they had in common. This was especially true in the blue zone discovered in Loma Linda, California. Prior to this discovery the extent of the long and healthy lives these amazing people live was not well known to the general public. Loma Linda is the home of Loma Linda University and Adventists make up the majority of the population living there. In addition to being where the Adventist Medical School is located, the university graduates one of the highest percentages of registered dieticians and nutritionists in the world. Interestingly Loma Linda appears to be maintaining their longevity better than the other blue zones in the study. Obesity has become a problem among the young in Okinawa and fast food has invaded Sardinia, so the faith based component appears to be a bigger factor than originally thought. World life expectancy
Like many Adventists, Marge spends most of her time with other Adventists. « It’s difficult to have non-Adventist friends, » she says. « Where do you meet them? You don’t do the same things. I don’t go to movies or dances. » As a result, researchers say, Adventists increase their chances for long life by associating with people who reinforce their healthy behaviors. The National Geographic magazine
Many Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarians, physically active, and involved in their community. In other words, their lifestyles are quite unique in an America where community has become less and less important and over one third of the population is obese. Smoking and drinking are discouraged by the faith, as is the consumption of caffeine, rich foods, and certain spices. By most of our hyper-connected standards, the Seventh-Day Adventists are also an isolated community. Unlike other Christian sects that take their Sabbath on Sunday, they take theirs on Saturday. The more conservative members of the religion cut themselves off from popular culture altogether. Because of their unique lifestyle, scientists from a variety of organizations like the National Health Institute and the American Cancer Society have since 1958 been studying how the community’s dietary habits, lifestyle, disease rates, and mortality interact in a series of studies known as the Adventist Health Studies. What they have found in the decades since is remarkable. Loma Linda leads the country in longevity. While the average American woman will live to be 81, vegetarian Adventist women in Loma Linda will on average live to be 86. While the average American man will live until 76, the average vegetarian Adventist man will live until 83. The Adventists are also notably resilient. (…) The death rate from cancer for Adventist men is 60 percent lower than that of the average California male; for Adventist women, it is 75 percent lower. According to Loma Linda University, ground zero in the Adventist Health Studies, « Death from coronary heart disease among Adventist men was 66 percent [lower compared to their California peers]; for Adventist women, it was 98 percent [lower]. Stroke death rates for Adventist men were 72 percent [lower], compared to their non-Adventist counterparts. For Adventist women, death from stroke was 82 percent [lower]. » These facts have led Buettner, a National Geographic Explorer, to label Loma Linda America’s hot spot (or « blue zone ») of health and longevity. Their physical health is not the only thing outpacing that of regular Americans. On measures of mental health and well-being, the Adventists also score much higher than the average American. (…) Beyond their conservative lifestyle and commitment to faith — research shows that attending religious services regularly is associated with greater longevity and happiness — there is also the matter of what they eat, which is a mostly Mediterranean diet. Eating like Greeks not only can account for their excellent health, but it may also explain why they score higher on measures of well-being. According to research in psychology, happiness is determined by three variables. Your genetic makeup accounts for 50 percent, and your circumstances account for 10 percent. The remainder of your enduring happiness is determined by the choices we voluntarily make — how we think and act and what we do on a day-to-day basis. That 40 percent, as social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky points out in her book The How of Happiness, can go a long way. According to a new large study, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, eating Mediterranean foods is linked to feeling happy. People who eat foods associated with a Mediterranean diet — non-starchy fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, olive oil, legumes, and nuts — experience more of those emotions associated with being happy than people who eat a typically American diet, which consists of high-fat dairy products, eggs, refined grains, and processed food. The health benefits of eating Mediterranean foods have been well documented. People whose diets incorporate a healthy serving of fresh vegetables, olive oil, fish, whole grains, and fruit are at lower risk for heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in the United States. They are also at lower risk for diabetes and Alzheimer’s. They are better able to control their weight and cholesterol levels; they tend to be more alert; they exhibit less depressive symptoms; and they may live longer. (…) According to Gary Fraser, a doctor and professor at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine, « Adventists who consumed nuts at least five times a week had about half the risk of heart disease of those who didn’t. This was true of men, women, vegetarian, non-vegetarian–we split the population up about 16 or 17 different ways and each time asked the question, ‘Does nut consumption matter?’ And every time we saw that it did. » The nut eaters also lived two years longer than those who did not regularly consume nuts. (…) If you are an Adventist woman who eats tomatoes three or four times a week, you are 70 percent less likely to get ovarian cancer than your friends who eat tomatoes more sparingly. For men, eating tomatoes decreases the chances of getting prostate cancer. Finally, eating meat makes a big difference. Adventist men who do not eat meat outlive American men by seven years. Adventist women who do not eat meat outlive American women by five years. Many Adventists do not eat meat, but even those that do outlive their peers thanks to the amount of vegetables, fruits, and other healthy foods they eat. Meat-eating Adventist men live 7.3 years longer while the women live 4.4 years longer than other Californians. (…) Emerging research in the fields of neuroscience and nutrition show that people who eat a diet of modern processed foods have increased levels of depression, anxiety, mood swings, hyperactivity, and a wide variety of other mental and emotional problems. One study found that adolescents with low-quality junk food diets are 79 percent more likely to suffer from depression. Another found that diets high in trans fats found in processed foods raised the risk of depression by 42 percent among adults over the course of approximately six years. And a huge study of women’s diets by the Harvard School of Public Health concluded that those whose diets contained the greatest number of healthy omega-3 fats (and the lowest levels of unhealthy omega-6s) were significantly less likely to suffer from depression. The Atlantic
En ces temps étranges où même les nouvelles peuvent se révéler dangereuses pour la santé …
Et de plus en plus d’Occidentaux et surtout d’Américains, sont gagnés par le surpoids et l’obésité …
Retour, avec la revue américaine The Atlantic, sur une petite tribu d’irréductibles qui, à l’instar du village gaulois d’Astérix, résiste encore et toujours au mode de vie ambiant …
Et, mangeant à la grecque, truste les records de longévité à la Méthusalem …
The Lovely Hill: Where People Live Longer and Happier
Emily Esfahani Smith
The Atlantic
Feb 4 2013
In one idyllic community in southern California, Adventists live 4 to 7 years longer — and more healthily and happily — than the rest of the country. A look at their diet, lifestyle, and philosophy
When Ellsworth Wareham was in his nineties, he decided that his house in Loma Linda, California — a beautiful city 60 miles east of Los Angeles, Spanish for « lovely hill » — needed a new fence. But rather than hire a contractor to install the wood fence, as most nonagenarians would no doubt do, Wareham went to the hardware store, bought the supplies he needed, and returned to dig some post holes. As Dan Buettner recounts in his book Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, Wareham proceeded to put the wood fence up himself.
A few days later, Wareham was in the hospital — performing open-heart surgery on a patient.
Wareham has had some extraordinary experiences. During World War II, he was a doctor in the Navy; once, when he was on board a destroyer near the coast of Okinawa, he removed the appendix of an officer as the ship was being tossed about in the middle of a typhoon. In the 1950s, he did pioneering work on open-heart surgery when it was still a new technique. On a U.S. State Department sponsored trip in 1963, some surgeons from Loma Linda — including Wareham — were with a team of doctors that brought open-heart surgery to Pakistan for the first time. And during the Vietnam War, the work that he and other heart surgeons did in Saigon was featured on the Walter Cronkite show.
By many accounts, Wareham, now 98, has led a good, full, and meaningful life. What does he know that we don’t?
As a middle-aged man, Wareham spent a lot of time in the operating room cutting into one patient after another who had heart problems. There, he noticed something: patients who were vegetarian mostly had much cleaner and smoother arteries than those who ate meat. The arteries of meat-eaters tended to be full of calcium and plaque.
So he made a choice. He decided to become a vegan. That decision was not too hard to make given the fact that many of the inhabitants of his southern Californian community were already very health conscious. Consider: there is no meat sold at one of the largest grocery stores in town. In fact, as recently as a generation ago, meat was difficult to find in the grocery stores of Loma Linda, as the New York Times reports. On top of that, smoking is banned in the town; alcohol is scarcely available; and fast food restaurants are hard to come by.
But make no mistake: Loma Linda is not some bohemian enclave of free-spirited vegans. Rather, what makes the community remarkable — and remarkably health conscious — is that it is home to one of the largest concentrations of Seventh-Day Adventists in the world. A conservative denomination of Christianity founded during this country’s Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s, the religion advocates a healthy lifestyle as a main tenet of the faith. This is a major reason why Wareham, a Seventh-Day Adventist, takes his health so seriously.
« Adventists believe in the body and soul as one, » according to Dr. Daniel Giang of Loma Linda University’s Medical Center. Pastor Randy Roberts of the same university references scripture to drive the point home: « In Corinthians, Paul speaking of the human body says specifically, ‘you are the temple of the Holy spirit.’ Therefore, he says, whatever you do in your body, you do it to the honor, the glory and the praise of God. » The Seventh-Day Adventists, like Jews and Muslims, stay away from foods that the Bible deems impure, like pork.
Many Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarians, physically active, and involved in their community. In other words, their lifestyles are quite unique in an America where community has become less and less important and over one third of the population is obese. Smoking and drinking are discouraged by the faith, as is the consumption of caffeine, rich foods, and certain spices. By most of our hyper-connected standards, the Seventh-Day Adventists are also an isolated community. Unlike other Christian sects that take their Sabbath on Sunday, they take theirs on Saturday. The more conservative members of the religion cut themselves off from popular culture altogether.
Because of their unique lifestyle, scientists from a variety of organizations like the National Health Institute and the American Cancer Society have since 1958 been studying how the community’s dietary habits, lifestyle, disease rates, and mortality interact in a series of studies known as the Adventist Health Studies. What they have found in the decades since is remarkable.
Loma Linda leads the country in longevity. While the average American woman will live to be 81, vegetarian Adventist women in Loma Linda will on average live to be 86. While the average American man will live until 76, the average vegetarian Adventist man will live until 83.
The Adventists are also notably resilient. « Some Adventists get personally offended if they get colon cancer or some other disease, » says a doctor from the town.
The death rate from cancer for Adventist men is 60 percent lower than that of the average California male; for Adventist women, it is 75 percent lower. According to Loma Linda University, ground zero in the Adventist Health Studies, « Death from coronary heart disease among Adventist men was 66 percent [lower compared to their California peers]; for Adventist women, it was 98 percent [lower]. Stroke death rates for Adventist men were 72 percent [lower], compared to their non-Adventist counterparts. For Adventist women, death from stroke was 82 percent [lower]. »
These facts have led Buettner, a National Geographic Explorer, to label Loma Linda America’s hot spot (or « blue zone ») of health and longevity. Their physical health is not the only thing outpacing that of regular Americans. On measures of mental health and well-being, the Adventists also score much higher than the average American.
***
What are the Adventists doing differently from the rest of us? Beyond their conservative lifestyle and commitment to faith — research shows that attending religious services regularly is associated with greater longevity and happiness — there is also the matter of what they eat, which is a mostly Mediterranean diet. Eating like Greeks not only can account for their excellent health, but it may also explain why they score higher on measures of well-being.
According to research in psychology, happiness is determined by three variables. Your genetic makeup accounts for 50 percent, and your circumstances account for 10 percent. The remainder of your enduring happiness is determined by the choices we voluntarily make — how we think and act and what we do on a day-to-day basis. That 40 percent, as social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky points out in her book The How of Happiness, can go a long way.
According to a new large study, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, eating Mediterranean foods is linked to feeling happy. People who eat foods associated with a Mediterranean diet — non-starchy fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, olive oil, legumes, and nuts — experience more of those emotions associated with being happy than people who eat a typically American diet, which consists of high-fat dairy products, eggs, refined grains, and processed food.
The health benefits of eating Mediterranean foods have been well documented. People whose diets incorporate a healthy serving of fresh vegetables, olive oil, fish, whole grains, and fruit are at lower risk for heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in the United States. They are also at lower risk for diabetes and Alzheimer’s. They are better able to control their weight and cholesterol levels; they tend to be more alert; they exhibit less depressive symptoms; and they may live longer.
To see what a difference eating Greek makes, consider the effects that just three simple patterns of the Mediterranean diet have had on the Adventists.
The first is the role of nuts, which forms a large part of the Adventist diet in Loma Linda. According to Gary Fraser, a doctor and professor at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine, « Adventists who consumed nuts at least five times a week had about half the risk of heart disease of those who didn’t. This was true of men, women, vegetarian, non-vegetarian–we split the population up about 16 or 17 different ways and each time asked the question, ‘Does nut consumption matter?’ And every time we saw that it did. » The nut eaters also lived two years longer than those who did not regularly consume nuts.
Then there are tomatoes, a staple of the Mediterranean diet. If you are an Adventist woman who eats tomatoes three or four times a week, you are 70 percent less likely to get ovarian cancer than your friends who eat tomatoes more sparingly. For men, eating tomatoes decreases the chances of getting prostate cancer.
Finally, eating meat makes a big difference. Adventist men who do not eat meat outlive American men by seven years. Adventist women who do not eat meat outlive American women by five years. Many Adventists do not eat meat, but even those that do outlive their peers thanks to the amount of vegetables, fruits, and other healthy foods they eat. Meat-eating Adventist men live 7.3 years longer while the women live 4.4 years longer than other Californians.
On the other side of the spectrum, we know that certain dietary patterns, like eating lots of fatty foods, are associated with depression and mental illness.
Drew Ramsay, MD, of Columbia University elaborates:
Emerging research in the fields of neuroscience and nutrition show that people who eat a diet of modern processed foods have increased levels of depression, anxiety, mood swings, hyperactivity, and a wide variety of other mental and emotional problems. One study found that adolescents with low-quality junk food diets are 79 percent more likely to suffer from depression. Another found that diets high in trans fats found in processed foods raised the risk of depression by 42 percent among adults over the course of approximately six years. And a huge study of women’s diets by the Harvard School of Public Health concluded that those whose diets contained the greatest number of healthy omega-3 fats (and the lowest levels of unhealthy omega-6s) were significantly less likely to suffer from depression.
While scientists know a lot about the health benefits of a Mediterranean diet and eating patterns associated with mental illness, they know far less about the eating habits that are related to a thriving and good life. This new study steps in to fill that void.
« Much of the published research has focused upon food’s association with depression and foods association with disease, » Patricia Ford, the lead author of the study, tells me. « This study is focusing upon positive health and positive well-being. »
Ford and her team at Loma Linda University examined the eating patterns of over 9,000 healthy Seventh-Day Adventists in North America over a four-year period. How often did they eat fast food? Did they eat meat? What kinds of dairy products were they consuming? What about nuts? Desserts? Fish? They then examined their self-reported feelings of positive and negative emotions–how often did they feel inspired? Excited? Enthusiastic? Upset? Scared? Distressed?
The researchers found that those who eat like Greeks feel more inspired, alert, excited, active, inspired, determined, attentive, proud, and enthusiastic than those who consume a more typically American diet consisting of highly processed foods, soda, and sweets like cookies and doughnuts. People who eat foods associated with a Mediterranean diet also experienced less negative emotions like being afraid, nervous, upset, irritable, scared, hostile, and distressed. The more people ate those foods that are more typically American — specifically, red meat, sweets, and fast food — the less of these positive emotions they felt.
For women, the findings of Ford’s study were particularly dramatic. Though men ate more red meat, processed foods, desserts, sodas, and fast foods than women, when women ate unhealthily, they experienced more emotional distress. Not only did those who ate red meat and fast food frequently experience less positive moods, but they also experienced more negative feelings, a pattern not seen in men who ate less healthy foods.
There’s More to Life Than Being Happy
Those women might look to the life of Marge Jetton for inspiration. Like Wareham, Jetton is a model of the Adventist lifestyle. At 100 years old, Jetton, a former nurse, would wake up at 4.30 am each morning. After getting dressed and reading from the Bible, she would work out. When she completed her mile-long walk and 6-8 miles on the stationary bike, she had oatmeal for breakfast. For lunch, she would mix up some raw vegetables and fruit. Occasionally, she would splurge on a treat like waffles made from soy and garbanzo beans. That wasn’t all. The centenarian volunteered regularly, barreled around town in her Cadillac Seville, and pumped iron. She also tended to a garden that grew tomatoes, corn, and hydrangeas.
Though she was sad and lonely after her husband died in 2003, she found happiness in serving other people. « I found that when you are depressed, that’s when you do something for somebody else … My motto is: A stranger is a friend we haven’t met yet. » Another motto: « Try to be happy in spite of your trials. »
She died in February 2011 at the age of 106. Her friends and community remembered her as being quick-witted and funny. « She represented the promise of good living, » Buettner said when she died.
Voir aussi:
LONGEVITY HOT SPOTS – Highest Life Expectancy In The World?
THE LONGEST LIVING PEOPLE ON EARTH CALL THESE PLACES HOME
Only five official Blue Zones exist in the entire world. They are located in regions of different countries where people commonly live active lives past the age of 100. It took several years of research for scientists and demographers to find them and even longer to classify them. Each longevity « hot-spot » required intense study to determine the healthy traits and life practices they had in common that caused them to lead, healthier and happier lives. A blue zone is considered to be a « longevity oasis » and the people who live there are believed to have the longest life expectancies on earth.
The longest living women were found in Okinawa, Japan. Another blue zone was discovered in the mountains of Sardinia, Italy where even men reach the age of 100 at an amazing rate, another was discovered on the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica in 2007. Only one of the blue zones is located in the United States. It was found when researchers, who were studying a group of Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California, discovered they suffered from a fraction of the diseases that commonly kill people in other parts of the United States and throughout the developed world. The final blue zone was found on an expedition to the island of Ikaria, Greece where they have 50% lower rates of heart disease, 20% less cancer, and almost zero dementia.
Women live longer in Okinawa than anywhere in the world
What’s their secret formula for adding another 10 healthy years? Funded in part by the U.S. National Institute on Aging, scientists focused on these longevity hot spots to answer that question and found that while it helps to have good genes, that’s less than 30% of the equation. If you adopt the right lifestyle, they concluded the other 70% can be up to us. « The secret of good health is to move, » says 88-year-old Hoei Tabaru, who keeps in shape spearing octopus from the sea, picking vegetables in his garden and by biking through his village on the island of Okinawa. Tabaru, who has never driven a car, hopes modern technology will not transform island life. « The world is too easy today, » he says, « at least for an old man like me. » Other traits the people living in the blue zones have in common include, less stress and more socializing, strong emphasis on family, a fresh natural plant based diet (eat lots of beans), very little red meat and they exercise daily. Living their lives with a sense of purpose was a big factor. It insures they look forward to getting up in the morning.
Ikaraia peninsula, Greece
Although their religious beliefs varied, having a strong belief in God was another trait they had in common. This was especially true in the blue zone discovered in Loma Linda, California. Prior to this discovery the extent of the long and healthy lives these amazing people live was not well known to the general public. Loma Linda is the home of Loma Linda University and Adventists make up the majority of the population living there. In addition to being where the Adventist Medical School is located, the university graduates one of the highest percentages of registered dieticians and nutritionists in the world.
Interestingly Loma Linda appears to be maintaining their longevity better than the other blue zones in the study. Obesity has become a problem among the young in Okinawa and fast food has invaded Sardinia, so the faith based component appears to be a bigger factor than originally thought. The blue zones have had significant media coverage, including ABC News, World News Tonight and a National Geographic study… Dan Buettner wrote a book about the blue zones and if you’re into longevity it is a must read.
Voir enfin:
Residents of Okinawa, Sardinia, and Loma Linda, California, live longer, healthier lives than just about anyone else on Earth.
Dan Buettner
National Geographic
November 2005
What if I said you could add up to ten years to your life?
A long healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. If you adopt the right lifestyle, experts say, chances are you may live up to a decade longer. So what’s the formula for success? In recent years researchers have fanned out across the globe to find the secrets to long life. Funded in part by the U.S. National Institute on Aging, scientists have focused on several regions where people live significantly longer. In Sardinia, Italy, one team of demographers found a hot spot of longevity in mountain villages where men reach age 100 at an amazing rate. On the islands of Okinawa, Japan, another team examined a group that is among the longest lived on Earth. And in Loma Linda, California, researchers studied a group of Seventh-day Adventists who rank among America’s longevity all-stars. Residents of these three places produce a high rate of centenarians, suffer a fraction of the diseases that commonly kill people in other parts of the developed world, and enjoy more healthy years of life. In sum, they offer three sets of « best practices » to emulate. The rest is up to you.
Sardinians
Out in the work shed behind his house in the village of Silanus, 75-year-old Tonino Tola emerges elbow-deep from the steaming carcass of a freshly slaughtered calf, sets down his knife, and greets me with a warm, bloody handshake. Then he takes his thick glistening fingers and tickles the chin of his five-month-old grandson, Filippo, who regards the scene from his mother’s arms. « Goochi, goochi goo, » Tonino whispers. For this strapping, six-foot-tall shepherd, these two things—hard work and family—form the bedrock of his life. They may also help explain why Tonino and his neighbors are a hot spot of longevity.
A community of 2,400 people, Silanus is located on the sloping fringes of the Gennargentu Mountains in central Sardinia, where parched pastures erupt into granite peaks. In a cluster of villages in the heart of a region called the Blue Zone by demographers, 91 of the 17,865 people born between 1880 and 1900 have lived to their hundredth birthday—a rate more than twice as high as the average for Italy.
Why the extraordinary longevity here? Lifestyle is part of the answer. By 11 a.m. on this particular day, Tonino has already milked four cows, split half a cord of wood, slaughtered a calf, and walked four miles (6.4 kilometers) of pasture with his sheep. Now, taking the day’s first break, he gathers his grown children, grandson, and visitors around the kitchen table. Giovanna, his wife, a robust woman with quick, intelligent eyes, unties a handkerchief containing a paper-thin flatbread called carta da musica, fills our tumblers with red wine, and slices a round of homemade pecorino cheese with the thumping severity of a woman in charge.
Like many wives here whose husbands are busy tending sheep, Giovanna shoulders the burdens of managing the house and family finances. Among Mediterranean cultures, Sardinian women have a reputation for taking on the stress of these responsibilities. For the men, less stress may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, which may explain why the ratio of female to male centenarians is nearly one to one in some parts of Sardinia, compared with a four to one ratio favoring women in the United States.
« I do the work, » admits Tonino, hooking Giovanna around the waist, « my ragazza does the worrying. »
These Sardinians also benefit from their genetic history. About 11,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers from the Iberian Peninsula made their way eastward to Sardinia. After several millennia the Bronze Age Nuragic culture arose on the island’s fertile coastal plains. When military powers such as the Phoenicians and Romans discovered Sardinia’s charms, the natives were forced to retreat deeper and deeper into the highlands. There they developed a wariness of foreigners and a reputation for banditry, kidnapping, and settling vendettas with the lesoria, the traditional Sardinian shepherd’s knife.
In their isolation native Sardinians became genetic incubators, amplifying certain traits over generations. Even today roughly 80 percent of them are directly related to the first Sardinians, says Paolo Francalacci of the University of Sassari. Somewhere in this genetic mix, he says, may lie a combination that favors longevity.
Tonino’s family’s diet is another factor. It’s loaded with homegrown fruits and vegetables such as zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, and fava beans that may reduce the risk of heart disease and colon cancer. Also on the table: dairy products such as milk from grass-fed sheep and pecorino cheese, which, like fish, contribute protein and omega-3 fatty acids. Tonino still makes wine from his small vineyard of Cannonau grapes, which in this mountainous part of Sardinia contain two to three times as much of a component found in other wines that may prevent cardiovascular disease.
But with globalization and modernization, even remote Sardinia is changing. Cars and trucks have eliminated the need to walk long distances. Young people are more outward-looking and less traditional. Obesity, virtually nonexistent before 1940, now afflicts about 10 percent of Sardinians. « Children want potato chips and pizzas. That’s what they see on TV, » says Tonino. « Bread and pecorino are old-fashioned. »
One thing that hasn’t changed: the Sardinians’ dedication to family, which assures both support in times of crisis and life-extending care for the elderly. « I would never put my father in a retirement home, » says Tonino’s daughter Irene. « It would dishonor the family. »
For Tonino, the workday still includes a late afternoon trek to pasture his 200 sheep. Looking jaunty in his cap, coat, and leather gaiters, he strides through a narrow opening in a stone wall, counting his sheep as they follow him. When three sheep try to squeeze through, they knock over a section of the wall. With disquieting ease, Tonino hoists the heavy rocks back into place. Then he leans back on a rock outcropping and assumes the age-old role of sentinel, a routine he has performed for many decades.
« Do you ever get bored? » I ask. Before the words leave my mouth, I realize I’ve uttered a heresy. Tonino swings around, pointing at me, dried blood still rimming his fingernail, and booms: « I’ve loved living here every day of my life. »
Okinawans
The first thing you notice about Ushi Okushima is her laugh. It begins in her belly, rumbles up to her shoulders, and then erupts with a hee-haw that fills the room with pure joy. I first met Ushi five years ago at her home in Okinawa, and now it’s that same laugh that draws me back to her small wooden house in the seaside village of Ogimi. This rainy afternoon she sits snugly wrapped in a blue kimono. A heroic shock of hair is combed back from her bronzed forehead revealing alert, green eyes. Her smooth hands lie serenely folded in her lap. At her feet sit her friends, Setsuko and Matsu Taira, cross-legged on a tatami mat, sipping tea. Since I last visited Ushi, she’s taken a new job, tried to run away from home, and started wearing perfume. Predictable behavior for a young woman, perhaps, but Ushi is 103. When I ask about the perfume, she jokes that she has a new boyfriend, then claps a hand over her mouth before unleashing one of her blessed laughs.
With an average life expectancy of 78 years for men and 86 years for women, Okinawans are among the world’s longest lived people. More important, elders living in this lush subtropical archipelago tend to enjoy years free from disabilities. Okinawans have a fifth the heart disease, a fourth the breast and prostate cancer, and a third less dementia than Americans, says Craig Willcox of the Okinawa Centenarian Study.
What’s the key to their success? « Ikigai certainly helps, » Willcox offers. The word translates roughly to « that which makes one’s life worth living. » Older Okinawans, he says, possess a strong sense of purpose that may act as a buffer against stress and diseases such as hypertension. Many also belong to a Okinawan-style moai, a mutual support network that provides financial, emotional, and social help throughout life.
A lean diet may also be a factor. « A heaping plate of Okinawan vegetables, tofu, miso soup, and a little fish or meat will have fewer calories than a small hamburger, » says Makoto Suzuki of the Okinawa Centenarian Study. « And it will have many more healthy nutrients. » What’s more, many Okinawans who grew up before World War II never developed the tendency to overindulge. They still live by the Confucian-inspired adage « hara hachi bu—eat until your stomach is 80 percent full. »
And they grow much of their own food. Taking one look at the gardens kept by Okinawan centenarians, Greg Plotnikoff, a traditional-medicine researcher at the University of Minnesota, called them « cabinets of preventive medicine. » Herbs, spices, fruits, and vegetables, such as Chinese radishes, garlic, scallions, cabbage, turmeric, and tomatoes, he said, « contain compounds that may block cancers before they start. »
Ironically, for many older Okinawans this diet was born of hardship. Ushi Okushima grew up barefoot and poor. Her family scratched a living out of Ogimi’s rocky terrain, growing sweet potatoes, which formed the core of every meal. To celebrate the New Year, her village butchered a pig, and everyone got a morsel of pork.
During World War II, when U.S. warships shelled Okinawa, Ushi and Setsuko, whose husbands had been conscripted into the Japanese Army, fled to the mountains with their children. « We experienced terrible hunger, » Setsuko recalls.
Ushi now wakes every morning at six and eats a small breakfast of milk, bananas, and tomatoes. Until very recently she grew most of her food (she gave up gardening when she took a job). But her tradition-honored daily rituals haven’t changed: morning prayers to her ancestors, tea with friends, lunch with family, an afternoon nap, a sunset social hour with friends, and before bed a cup of sake infused with the herb mugwort. « It helps me sleep, » she says.
Back in Ushi’s house we’re finishing our tea. Outside, dusk is falling; rain patters on the roof. Ushi’s daughter, Kikue, who is 78 and finds little amusement in the attention her mother draws, shoots me a glare that I take to mean « you’ve overstayed your welcome. » (When Ushi ran away from home, she was actually fleeing an argument with Kikue. She packed a bag and boarded a bus without telling her daughter. A relative caught up with her in a town 40 miles (64.4 kilometers) away.)
Ushi, Setsuko, and Matsu take the cue and fall silent in unison. These women have shared each other’s fortunes and endured each other’s sorrows for nearly a century and now seem to communicate wordlessly.
What is Ushi’s ikigai, I ask—that powerful sense of purpose that older Okinawans are said to possess?
« It’s her longevity itself, » answers her daughter. « She brings pride to our family and this village, and now feels she must keep living even though she is often tired. »
I look to Ushi for her own answer.
« My ikigai is right here, » she says with a slow sweep of her hand that takes in Setsuko and Matsu. « If they die, I will wonder why I am still living. »
Adventists
It’s Friday morning, and Marge Jetton is barreling down the San Bernardino Freeway in her mauve Cadillac Seville. She peers out the windshield from behind dark sunshades, her head barely clearing the steering wheel. Marge, who turned 101 in September, is late for one of several volunteer commitments she has today, and she’s driving fast. Already this morning she’s walked a mile (1.6 kilometers), lifted weights, and eaten her oatmeal. « I don’t know why God gave me the privilege of living so long, » she says, pointing to herself. « But look what he did. »
God may or may not have had something to do with Marge’s vitality, but her religion has. Marge is a Seventh-day Adventist. We’re in Loma Linda, California, halfway between Palm Springs and Los Angeles. Here, surrounded by orange groves and usually blanketed in mustard-colored smog, lives a much-studied concentration of Seventh-day Adventists.
The Adventist Church—born during the era of 19th-century health reforms that popularized organized vegetarianism, the graham cracker, and breakfast cereals (John Harvey Kellogg was an Adventist when he started making wheat flakes)—has always preached and practiced a message of health. It expressly forbids smoking, alcohol consumption, and eating biblically unclean foods, such as pork. It also discourages the consumption of other meat, rich foods, caffeinated drinks, and « stimulating » condiments and spices. « Grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator, » wrote Ellen White, an early figure who helped shape the Adventist Church. Adventists also observe the Sabbath on Saturday, socializing with other church members and enjoying a sanctuary in time that helps relieve stress. Today most Adventists follow the prescribed lifestyle—a testimony, perhaps, to the power of mixing health and religion.
From 1976 to 1988 the National Institutes of Health funded a study of 34,000 California Adventists to see whether their health-oriented lifestyle affected their life expectancy and risk of heart disease and cancer. The study found that the Adventists’ habit of consuming beans, soy milk, tomatoes, and other fruits lowered their risk of developing certain cancers. It also suggested that eating whole wheat bread, drinking five glasses of water a day, and, most surprisingly, consuming four servings of nuts a week reduced their risk of heart disease. And it found that not eating red meat had been helpful to avoid both cancer and heart disease.
In the end the study reached a stunning conclusion, says Gary Fraser of Loma Linda University: The average Adventist lived four to ten years longer than the average Californian. That makes the Adventists one of the nation’s most convincing cultures of longevity.
I meet Marge at the Plaza Place hair salon in Redlands, where she’s kept an 8 a.m. appointment with stylist Barbara Miller every Friday for the past 20 years. When I arrive, Marge is flipping through a copy of Reader’s Digest as Barbara uncurls a silver lock of hair. « You’re late! » she shouts. Behind Marge a line of stylists languidly coif other heads of hair, all in varying shades of gray. « We’re a bunch of dinosaurs around here, » Barbara whispers to me. « You may be, » Marge shoots back. « Not me. »
Half an hour later, her hair a cottony tuft, Marge leads me to her car. She doesn’t walk, quite, but scoots with a snappy, can-do shuffle. « Get in, » she orders. « You can help. » We drive to the Loma Linda adult services center, a day-care center for seniors, most of whom are several decades younger than Marge. She pops open her trunk and heaves out four bundles of magazines she’s collected during the week. « The old folks here like to read them and cut out the pictures for crafts, » Marge explains. Old folks?
Next stop: delivering recyclable bottles to a woman on welfare who will later redeem them for deposits. On the way Marge tells me she was born poor, to a mule skinner father and homemaker mother in Yuba City, California. She remembers the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, when she was just a toddler, and the aftershock that reached her family farm and sloshed water out of the animal trough. She worked as a nurse, put her husband through medical school, and raised two children as a doctor’s wife. Her husband, James, died two days before their 77th anniversary. « Of course I feel lonely once in a while, but for me that’s always been a sign to get up and go help somebody. »
Like many Adventists, Marge spends most of her time with other Adventists. « It’s difficult to have non-Adventist friends, » she says. « Where do you meet them? You don’t do the same things. I don’t go to movies or dances. » As a result, researchers say, Adventists increase their chances for long life by associating with people who reinforce their healthy behaviors.
At noon, back at Linda Valley Villa, where Marge lives in a community of retired Adventists, she treats me to lunch. We sit by ourselves, but a stream of neighbors stop by to say hello. Over tofu casserole and mixed green salad, I ask Marge to share her longevity wisdom.
« I haven’t eaten meat in 50 years, and I never eat between meals, » she says, tapping her perfect teeth. « They’re all mine. » Her volunteer work helps her avoid the life-shortening loneliness suffered by so many seniors—and gives her a sense of purpose, which imbues the lives of other successful centenarians. « I realized a long time ago that I needed to go out to the world, » she says. « The world was not going to come to me. »
I have a last question for Marge. After interviewing more than 50 centenarians on three continents, I’ve found every one likable; there hasn’t been a grump in the bunch. What’s the secret to a century of congeniality?
« Well, I like to talk to people, » she says. « I look at strangers as friends I haven’t met yet. » She pauses to rethink her answer. « Then again, people may look at me and wonder, Why doesn’t that woman keep her mouth shut! »
COMPLEMENT:
Watch a classic Post Toasties television commercial from 1964
Breakfast, colonial-style, was generally simple stuff: bread and cheese, porridge, cornmeal mush, tea, and beer. By the 19th century, however, breakfast—at least in middle- and upper-class circles—had become indistinguishable from dinner, a vast spread including everything from ham and eggs to beefsteak, broiled fowl, fried oysters, fish, sausages, and fritters. The fad for massive meals, coupled with the switch from an active rural lifestyle to a sedentary urban lifestyle, inevitably led to health problems. Farm laborers worked off their big breakfasts; office workers who spent the bulk of their time sitting behind a desk, didn’t.
The result was a national epidemic of dyspepsia, an ailment characterized by headache, heartburn, palpitations, belching, nausea, despondency, miscellaneous sharp pains, nightmares, and cold feet. The best guess, in modern terms, was chronic indigestion.
At the time, there were numerous theories for causes and cures. Proposed culprits included pancakes, undercooked bread, coffee, and bacon (“decidedly injurious,” wrote one nutritionist). The suffering public, at a loss, was primed for remedial diets. A proposed solution was a radical change in the nature of breakfast.
Cereal: Cure for all Ails
The progenitor of modern breakfast cereal was Dr. James Caleb Jackson, proprietor of a health spa in Danville, New York. Jackson was a disciple of Sylvester Graham of the eponymous cracker, an early 19th century minister and temperance activist. Graham had popularized a health regime that included abstinence from tobacco, liquor, and spices, a vegetarian diet, cold baths, hard beds, early rising, and vigorous exercise. Jackson’s contribution to the program, invented in 1863, was a mix of twice-baked whole-wheat crackers, ground into chunks the size of peas, and marketed as Granula. This could only be eaten if it were soaked in milk overnight—critics lambasted it as “wheat rocks”—but even so it was an early-morning success.
Next on the cereal bandwagon was another Grahamite, John Harvey Kellogg, director of the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan. Kellogg—whose own favored breakfast consisted of seven graham crackers and an apple—was famed for his punitive diet-and-fitness programs, subscribed to by such celebrities as President Taft, Amelia Earhart, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. (Visitors to Battle Creek variously subjected themselves to yogurt enemas, electric-light baths, and a range of intimidating exercise machines, among them the Mechanical Camel.)
Kellogg’s first attempt at a health-promoting breakfast cereal was a conglomeration of mashed biscuits of oats, wheat, and cornmeal that went on the market in 1877 under the already-coined name of Granula. (Jackson, peeved, sued, and Kellogg changed the name to Granose.) His next attempt produced the first flake cereal, made by rolling out partially cooked whole grains, then toasting them until they were crisp and dry. He first tried wheat, which was a dud; then corn.
A Spoonful of Sugar
Kellogg’s cornflakes, though invented by John, owe their commercial success to his brother Will, who insisted on adding sugar to the recipe to make John’s admirable but bland flakes more palatable. In terms of appeal, Will was right, which is why his signature (not John’s) ended up on the original Cornflakes box. The sugar-fortified flakes were the foundation of the soon-to-be-enormous Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, established in 1906.
In terms of advertising, however, the Kellogg brothers were small potatoes compared to Charles W. Post. Post, who came to Battle Creek in 1891 for ulcer treatments, soon segued from patient to health-food entrepreneur. He first invented Postum, a bran-based substitute for coffee (“It makes blood red”), then Grape-Nuts, a cold cereal made from a crushed mix of baked wheat and barley. Post’s shameless and unsubstantiated claims for his cereal’s benefits contributed to what was shortly to become a turn-of-the-century cereal bonanza. Grape-Nuts, according to Post, could boost the IQ, anchor loose teeth, and cure consumption, malaria, and appendicitis. By 1911, over a hundred cereal companies were in operation in Battle Creek, and cold cereal–quick and convenient—was fast becoming the standard American breakfast meal.
Tony the Tiger was invented in 1951 to help promote Frosted Flakes for Kelloggs. Watch a vintage television ad of Tony the Tiger that aired in 1959.
Breakfast cereal owes its phenomenal success to both advertising and sugar. The first pre-sweetened cereal, Ranger Joe Popped Wheat Honnies, came on the market in 1939, fondly hoped by its creator to prevent kids from loading excess sugar on their breakfast bowls. It didn’t; instead, the industry, inspired by it, produced more and more sugary and kid-targeted cereals. Today, for example, Fruit Loops are 48 percent sugar by weight; Apple Jacks (with marshmallows), 50 percent; and Honey Smacks, 56 percent.
Sugary cereals went hand-in-hand with television. By the 1960s, over 90 percent of cereal advertising was aimed at kids, through such catchy cartoon icons as Rice Krispies’s elvish Snap, Crackle, and Pop; Frosted Flakes’s Tony the Tiger (“They’re Gr-r-reat!”); and the perennially foiled Trix rabbit (“Silly rabbit. Trix are for kids.”)
Should You Eat Cereal for Breakfast?
Even fortified with the vitamins that are ordinarily eliminated during processing, cold cereals were nutrition-less enough that Robert Choate, 1970s science advisor to Richard Nixon, protested their promotion and sales. Choate analyzed sixty popular cereal brands and found that two-thirds of them offered nothing but “empty calories.” He further pointed out that rats fed on ground-up cereal boxes fared better than rats fed on the cereals themselves.
It’s an ongoing concern. Dozens of studies indicate that breakfast is a good idea. Kids do better in school and adults are more efficient at work if they eat breakfast. However, all breakfasts aren’t created equal, and those with a high glycemic index—sugary bowlsful with a lot of quickly absorbed carbohydrates—lead to a rapid peak and drop in blood-sugar levels.
Packaged cereals, though there are exceptions, generally aren’t the best breakfast choice: one recent study of 275 popular cereal brands found that 75 percent were high in sugar. Better are sturdy whole-grain foods that hold blood-sugar levels steady over prolonged periods of time. Recommendations include peanut-butter sandwiches, burritos with beans, and whole-grain cereals with yogurt.
Or oatmeal or cornmeal mush. Which pretty much takes us back full circle to where we were before James Caleb Jackson, in 1863, started the whole cereal cascade by grinding up his twice-baked whole-wheat crackers.
References
-
- Breakfast Cereals Compared lists the nutritional components of many popular cereals. Included is a list of the nutritional worst picks.
- Bruce, Scott. Cerealizing America. Faber & Faber, 1995.
- Carroll, Abigail. “Reinventing Breakfast” in Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Basic Books, 2013.
- Gitlin, Martin, and Topher Ellis. The Great American Cereal Book. Abrams Image, 2012.
- Lawrence, Felicity. “Drop That Spoon! The Truth About Breakfast Cereals.” The Guardian, 23 November 2010.
Voir encore:
Drop that spoon! The truth about breakfast cereals
Britain is one of the world’s largest consumers of puffed, flaked and sugared breakfast cereals. How did that happen when many were said to contain less nutrition than the boxes they come in? Felicity Lawrence investigates
Felicity Lawrence
The Guardian
23 Nov 2010
How did it all begin?
It was one of those things that crept up on us and we still can’t quite believe it happened. Looking back, we’d been in denial for some time. Then a friend who hadn’t seen the family for a while came round and blurted out the bald truth. ‘God, Dodi’s got rather fat. In fact, you know, I think that might count as obese.’
Once said, it had to be admitted. If you looked at Dodi from behind when he was sitting down, you could see a substantial spare tyre around his thirteen-year-old middle. It bulged out from his hips and flopped down like a muffin rising up and out over its baking case. He had become quite lazy too, preferring to lounge in front of the fire rather than play in the garden as he used to. His excess weight was slowing him down.
He had been hooked on a particular brand of instant meal for ages.
Guaranteed real tuna, the packaging said. Enriched with omega-3 and -6 fats! The small print told another story. What was inside was largely byproducts from other industrial processing: rendered poultry meal mixed with fillers of corn gluten meal, ground rice, soya oil and dried beet pulp.
Dodi is our cat, and we know cats do not normally eat carbohydrates such as ground rice or sugar nor corn nor vegetables oils. Nevertheless that’s what we had been feeding him. It said on the packets that it was ‘scientifically formulated’ after all.
The absurdity of feeding an animal types of waste it never evolved to eat that actually makes it fat and sick ought to be easy enough to see. But we have not apparently been alone in our blindness – feline diabetes has risen dramatically in the last few years in the UK.
Where the human diet is concerned a similar myopia seems to have descended upon the British. Instead of relying on a food culture developed over centuries, we have come to defer top the pseudo-scientific instructions of professionals and marketeers.
Where did it all go wrong?
The rise of breakfast cereal makes a revealing case study in the evolutionary process behind the modern diet. One of the earliest convenience foods, processed cereals represents a triumph of marketing, packaging and US economic and foreign policy. They are the epitome of cheap commodity converted by manufacturing to higher value goods; of agricultural surplus turned into profitable export. Their ingredients have a disconcerting overlap with my cat food. Somehow they have wormed into our confused consciousness as intrinsically healthy when by and large they are degraded foods that have to have any goodness artificially restored. I have long been intrigued by how the British breakfast was conquered and what it tells us about the rest of our food. For this is the elephant in the room of course: it is the industrial processing of food that is the real problem. To understand where not we, but rather it, all went wrong, you have to understand the economic and political structures behind today’s food system.
The transformation of the British breakfast in the last 100 years has been complete. Unlike our European partners we have succumbed almost entirely to the American invention. A century ago simple cereal grains, cooked either as porridge or bread, were the staples of breakfast around the world and in this country too, just as they had been in previous centuries.
When the first National Food Survey was conducted on behalf of the medical officer of the Privy Council, Sir John Simon, in 1863 it questioned 370 families of the ‘labouring poor’ and found that breakfast consisted variously of tea kettle broth (bread soaked in hot milk and salt), bread and butter, bread and cheese, milk gruel, bread and water and oatmeal and milk porridge. Today, instead, the British and the Irish are the largest eaters of puffed, flaked, flavoured, shaped, sugared, salted and extruded cereals in the world. We munch an average of 6.7kg of the dehydrated stuff per person in the UK and 8.4kg each in Ireland.
The Mediterraneans, generally credited with a healthy diet, have so far kept this form of instant breakfast down to an average one kilo per person per year. The French, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys of American opprobrium, have proved culturally resistant to transatlantic pressure in this as in other fields. While the Eastern Europeans, deprived of marketing until the fall of the communism and the break up of the Soviet Union, have barely heard of processed cereals yet, being capable of getting through the first meal of the day with no apparent anxiety and only a few grams a year between them.
How can such a radical overhaul of a food culture come about and was there something peculiarly susceptible about the British and the Americans that led to it?
To find out, I went to the US, to the Mid-West states that are the heartland of industrial corn production and to the home of the first cornflakes, to try to understand something of the history and economics of the cereal business.
Prepackaged and ready-to-eat breakfast cereals began with the American temperance movement in the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, the Reverend Sylvester Graham preached the virtues of a vegetarian diet to his congregation and in particular the importance of wholemeal flour. Meat-eating, he said, excited the carnal passions. Granula considered the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, was developed from his ‘Graham flour’ by one of his followers, James Caleb Jackson, for patients at the latter’s water cure resort. It was a baked lump of slow-cooked wheat and water that was said to be hard as rock and had to be broken up and soaked overnight to be edible. It was sold at ten times the cost of its ingredients. The business motive for proselytizing by breakfast cereal was established.
Following on from Jackson, the Seventh Day Adventists took up the mission begun by Graham. A colony of them had set up in a small town called Battle Creek near the American Great Lakes in Michigan. There they established the Western Health Reform Institute in 1866 to cure hog guzzling and to their mind degenerate Americans of their dyspepsia and vices. John Harvey Kellogg turned it into the famous Battle Creek Sanatarium, a curious but money-spinning mix of health spa, holiday camp and experimental hospital. Kellogg, a sort of early cross between Billy Graham and Gillian McKeith, set about devising cures for what he believed were the common ills of the day, in particular constipation and masturbation. In Kellogg’s mind the two were closely linked, the common cause being a lack of fibre, both dietary and moral.
As well as prescribing daily cold water baths, exercise drills, and unorthodox medical interventions, creating health-giving foods for patients was a major preoccupation. Kellogg, his wife and his younger brother William Keith experimented in the Sanatarium kitchen to produce an easily digested form of cereal. They came up with their own highly profitable Granula, but were promptly sued by Jackson, the original maker of Granula, and had to change the name to Granola. Victorian prudery and religion may have been at the root of processed cereal development, but parables about camels and eyes of needles did not discourage any of these evangelicals from seeing the commercial advantage and using the law to protect their business interests.
Around this time an entrepreneur called Henry Perky had also invented a way of passing steamed wheat through rollers, one grooved and one smooth, to form strands that could be pressed into biscuits to make the first shredded wheat. JH Kellogg experimented further with his team and eventually they found a way of rolling cooked wheat to make flakes which could then be baked. Cornflakes followed when the Kelloggs worked out how to use cheap American corn instead of wheat, although initially they had problems keeping them crisp and preventing them from going rancid. This great leap forward is of a piece with other major developments in the industrialization of our diets: it is usually the combination of technological advances and the right economic conditions that lead to radical changes in what we eat.
It was a chronically dyspeptic businessman and former patient of Kellogg’s at the Sanatarium who unleashed the power of marketing on breakfast. Charles Post set up the rival La Vita Inn in Battle Creek and developed his own versions of precooked cereals. He distributed them with such encouraging tracts as The Road to Wellville. ‘The sunshine that makes a business plant grow is advertizing,’ he declared. He placed ads for his cereals in papers with paid-for testimonials from apparently genuine happy eaters. He also cheerfully invented diseases which his products could cure. His Grape Nuts were miraculously not only ‘brain food’ but could also cure consumption and malaria, and were even, despite their enamel-cracking hardness, said to be an antidote to loose teeth.
By 1903 Battle Creek had turned into a cereal Klondike. At one point there were over 100 cereal factories operating in the town to satisfy the new craze, many making fabulously exaggerated claims about the health benefits of their products. This symbiotic relationship between sales, health claims and the promotion of packaged breakfast cereals has continued ever since. Nor was it a coincidence that this particular Klondike sprang up in the American Mid-West, whose vast tracts of virgin land had been recently opened up by settlers and turned over to the agricultural production that powered US development.
The Kelloggs had tried unsuccessfully to protect their flaking process with patents. When WK saw how much others were making from the new foods, he launched his own advertizing campaign, giving away free samples and putting ads in newspapers.
The road to nutritional corruption opened up early. The Kellogg brothers argued over whether to make the cereals more palatable by adding sugar – the addition was anathema to John who saw sugar as an adulterant and a scourge, but William reckoned it was needed to stop the products tasting like ‘horse-food’. WK won.
Global expansion followed quickly. Britain saw its first cornflakes in 1924 when the company set up offices in London and used unemployed men and boy scouts to act as a sales force for the imported cereal which was shipped in from Canada. By 1936 UK sales topped £1 million, and Kellogg’s was ready to open its first British manufacturing plant in Manchester in 1938.
The technology used to make industrial quantities of breakfast cereal today is essentially the same as that developed from the kitchen experiments of those fundamentalist healers, although new ways have been found to add the sugar, salt and flavourings.
Cornflakes are generally made by breaking corn kernels into smaller grits which are then steam cooked in batches of up to a tonne under pressure of about 20lbs per square inch. The nutritious germ with its essential fats is first removed because, as the Kellogg brothers discovered all that time ago, it goes rancid over time and gets in the way of long shelf life. Flavourings, vitamins to replace those lost in processing and sugar may be added at this stage. It then takes four hours and vast amounts of energy to drive the steam out of the cooked grits before they can be rolled by giant rollers into flakes.
Steamed wheat biscuits such as shredded wheats are made with whole wheat grains which are pressure cooked with water. They are then passed between rollers which squeeze them into strands and build them up into layers. These processes begin the breakdown of the raw starches in the cereals so even though they are whole grains they are absorbed more quickly in the body – and they typically have glycemic index scores of around 75, close to the GIs in the high 70s or low 80s of cornflakes, Bran Flakes, Special K and Rice Krispies, compared with 45/46 for minimally-processed grains such as porridge or mueslis without sugar. (Glucose has a GI of 100 and is what these indexes measure other foods against. They indicate how fast different foods are converted to glucose and absorbed into the bloodstream.)
Worries about the nutritional value of such highly processed grains surfaced early. Post’s company was one of the first to begin the heavy duty pre-sweetening of cereals with sugar coating in the late 1940s. The sales were enviable. The Kellogg company however held back, according to interviews with former employees in Cerealizing America, the highly entertaining account of cereal history by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford. The charitable Kellogg Foundation which had been set up by then to promote children’s health and education was a major shareholder and was concerned that flogging sugar-coatings to the young might not be compatible with its purpose.
Many of the health benefits claimed for breakfast cereals depended on fortification rather than micronutrients from the raw ingredients, most of which were either destroyed by the process or stripped away before it. The earliest fortification was with vitamin D, the so-called sunshine vitamin, and acted as a marketing tool. Today a new wave of fortification is coming, and once again its principal purpose is marketing. Inulin, a form of fibre from plants, known to the food industry until recently as a cheap bulking agent thanks to its ability to retain water and mimic the mouthfeel of fats, is now added as a ‘prebiotic’. They have coined this word for it because it resists digestion in the upper gastrointestinal tract and reaches the large intestine almost intact where it is fermented by bacteria, encouraging the production of friendly microflora, which the industry markets too, as probiotics. The inulin, in other words, does what the fibre naturally occurring in whole grains would do if it hadn’t been stripped out by over processing.
Companies are also looking at adding omega-3 fatty acids such as DHA. (Where my cat food goes, breakfast cereals follow.) There are technical difficulties with this. Since the DHA tends to come from fish, it makes things taste fishy, and its flavour has to be masked with other additives.
That processed cereals had become little more than sugary junk with milk and vitamin pills added, was an accusation made as long ago as the 1970s. A US congressional hearing in 1970 was told by an adviser to President Nixon on nutrition, Robert Choate, that the majority of breakfast cereals ‘fatten but do little to prevent malnutrition’. Choate was outraged at the aggressive targeting of children in breakfast cereal advertizing. He analysed sixty well-known cereal brands for nutritional quality and concluded that two thirds of them offered ’empty calories, a term thus far applied to alcohol and sugar’. Rats fed a diet of ground-up cereal boxes with sugar, milk and raisins were healthier than rats fed the cereals themselves, he testified to senators.
Battle Creek today is a small backwater in Michigan three hours drive from Chicago. There is not much sign now of the cereal gold rush that changed the British palate, and the flake factories working day and night have mostly gone. But the legacy lives on. In their place alongside Kellogg airport and the Kellogg Foundation is Kellogg’s Cereal City. Built in the shape of an old American grain store, it is a museum testament to the power of marketing that so maddened Choate. Walking through the collection I too was struck by how much our breakfast today is the child of advertizing. Trading on our insecurity about health, manipulating our emotions and selling to us through health professionals has always been part of the great puff.
The antique cardboard boxes on show underline how from the first breakfast cereals sold not just a meal but a way of life: Power, Vim, Vigor, Korn Kinks and Climax cereal are among the early brand names. One of my favourite sections of the museum was the cabinet of boxes and pamphlets recording the original health claims that anticipate today’s persuasive messages. ‘Keeps the blood cool!’ ‘Makes red blood redder!’ There were the cereals that echoed today’s claims for prebiotics, ‘Will correct stomach troubles!’ or indeed the claims on my cat food, ‘The most scientific food in the world!’
Getting children hooked, making them associate breakfast cereal with fun and entertainment, blurring the lines between advertizing and programmes, exploiting new media – today it is the internet and viral marketing – was one of the main aims of competing manufacturers from the early days, as the museum displays show, and a crucial part in conquering the British breakfast. Kellogg’s sponsored a children’s programme called ‘The Singing Lady’. In 1931 the artist Vernon Grant heard the programme and was inspired to draw the Kellogg’s Rice Krispie ad characters Snap, Crackle and Pop. His cartoon characters were used in ad campaigns that catapulted Rice Krispie sales up into the league of the more established cornflakes brands. Walt Disney was powerfully influenced by Grant’s work. And when the Great Depression hit America in the 1930s following the crash of the stock market, WK Kellogg doubled his ad spend.
In 1939 Charles Post meanwhile introduced his own characters, a trio of bears, to sell his new Sugar Crisps. (The original three bears were of course happy with plain porridge.) Kellogg’s responded with Tony the Tiger and Katy the Kangaroo, although Katy retired after a year. Post also bought a licence from Disney to use his Mickey Mouse character on his cereal boxes.
The museum records how giveaway toys were being used by then too, to attract children’s loyalty and to encourage early pester power and repeat purchases.
Cereal advertizing likewise helped shape early television. A chance meeting on a train in 1949 between the then chairman of Kellogg’s and an advertizing man called Leo Burnett led to a working relationship that both transformed the cereal market and made the mould for TV ads. Burnett used ‘motivational research’ to work out how to appeal to women and children with different kinds of packaging. Subliminal marketing was born. With his help Kellogg’s broadcast the first colour TV programmes and commercials for children. The result was that by the mid 1950s the company had captured nearly half the rapidly expanding US processed cereal market and was in a prime position to build its empire in Europe using the same methods.
The UK market for those cereal boxes was worth over £1.27 billion in 2005. It too has been created and maintained by advertizing. It is characterized by health claims, now as then. Along with other highly processed foods such as fizzy drinks, and fast food brands, breakfast cereals are among the most highly marketed products.
Kellogg’s has consistently been the largest advertizer of its cereals in this country, spending roughly £50 million a year in recent years, about twice what its rival Cereal Partners spends. Cereal Partners is a joint venture with Nestlé which markets that company’s breakfast cereals in Britain and manufactures cereals for leading supermarkets’ own label brands. The respective investments are duly reflected in the companies’ market shares. We buy what we have been persuaded to buy.
Without advertizing we might never know we needed processed cereal and revert to porridge or bread instead. Or as Kellogg’s European president Tim Mobsby put it to MPs conducting an inquiry into obesity in 2004, ‘if we were not to have that capability [of TV advertizing] there is a probability that the consumption of cereals would actually drop…that is not necessarily a positive step forward.’
The following spring I was one of a handful of reporters flown in a private jet by Kellogg’s to its Old Trafford cornflakes factory, as part of its campaign to protect its portfolio and its ability to market it, particularly to children. The ostensible reason for the trip was that Kellogg’s was launching a new acquisition in the UK, Kashi, a brand of mixed-grain puffed cereal free of all additives. But criticism of the food industry for selling obeso-genic products high in fat, salt and sugar had reached a crescendo in the UK and the breakfast cereal manufacturers were the subject of unwelcome attention. Before touring the factory, we were ushered past the giant Tony the Tiger cut-out in the entrance lobby and up into the strategic planning department for a presentation on nutrition policy and labelling.
Here the company nutritionist explained how Kellogg’s had decided to take a lead in promoting a new kind of labelling to help ‘mum’ make ‘healthier choices’. Rather than the traffic light labelling the government’s food standards agency was researching, Kellogg’s and other leading food manufacturers had decided to go live with a system of labels based on guideline daily amounts. These would avoid identifying foods as good or bad with red, amber and green and instead give figures for how much fat, salt and sugar a portion of the product contained as a proportion of a guideline amount, calculated by the industry, which you should eat a day of those nutrients. Needless to say the industry’s guideline daily amounts were more generous than official targets, particularly on sugars. The FSA had already rejected this scheme as too complicated to be helpful but Kellogg’s told us that it had ‘lent them one of our researchers so we’ve been in on the consultation process and we’ve been able to get the GDAs into the final FSA testing’.
In response to pressure from the FSA, the Association of Cereal Food Manufacturers had already reduced salt by a quarter in five years, she went on. Cornflakes were even tastier than before because you could taste the corn more now. So why was there so much salt in the first place, we asked. The managing director of Kellogg’s Europe Tony Palmer confessed that ‘if we’d known you could take out 25 per cent of the salt and make cornflakes taste even better, we would have done it earlier. But it’s also about the interaction with the sugar – as you take the salt out, you’ve got to reduce the sugar because it starts to taste sweeter.’ But isn’t the target to reduce sugar consumption too? Why not just cut down on salt and sugar, we wondered. Well, sugar helps keep the crispness and is part of the bulk, so that would be difficult, we were told. Mr Palmer’s eyebrows started working furiously as he answered: ‘And the risk is, if you take the salt out you might be better off eating the cardboard carton for taste,’ he said.
The public relations team moved us rapidly on from this unfortunate echo of Senator Choate’s 1970s’ accusation of nutritional bankruptcy to a presentation on the Kashi Way. ‘We hold the spirit of health in all we do,’ one of them explained, echoing this time the quasi-religious marketing babble of the founding cereal makers.
Although I was aware that breakfast cereal manufacturers were among the top marketers of processed foods in the UK, it was only when the broadcasting regulator Ofcom tried to draw up new rules to restrict TV advertizing to children of junk foods, that I saw quite how dependent consumption was on us being manipulated by the manufacturers’ messages. Kellogg’s led a ferocious campaign of lobbying to stop the restrictions. As well as educating journalists with trips such as mine to the cornflakes factory, it lobbied MPs, ministers and regulators. One of its public relations agencies Hill and Knowlton boasted on its website how it had managed to change government and Whitehall thinking on Kellogg’s behalf. ‘A series of meetings with Number 10, the Department of Health, the Food Standards Agency, the Health Select committee, one-to-one briefings with key individuals and an event for parliamentarians’ had enabled them to disseminate Kellogg’s messages, with the result that ‘the campaign resulted in a significant shift in attitudes among core government stakeholders,’ they claimed.
The industry is adamant that its products are a healthy way to start the day, and has recruited Professor Tom Sanders, head of the nutrition department at King’s College London, to defend ‘breakfast cereals served with semi-skimmed milk’ as ‘low energy meals that provide about one fifth of the micronutrients of children’. However, a survey published by the independent consumer watchdog Which? called ‘Cereal Reoffenders’ took a rather different view. When it analysed 275 big-name breakfast cereals from leading manufacturers on sale in UK supermarkets in 2006 it found that 75 per cent of them had high levels of sugar, while almost a fifth had high levels of salt, according to criteria drawn up by the food standards agency for its traffic light nutritional labels. Nearly 90 per cent of those targeted at children were high in sugar, 13 per cent were high in salt, and 10 per cent were high in saturated fat. Several cereals making claims to be good for you got a red light too. All Bran was high in salt; Special K got a red for sugar and salt. Some high fibre bran cereals were giving you more salt per serving than a bag of crisps. (Some of these may have since been reformulated.)
It was when I saw details of the proposals from Ofcom on restricting marketing of junk foods to children that I understood why the lobbying had been so determined. What became clear was that breakfast cereals, although heavily marketed as healthy, would be the category to take the largest hit by a long way. About £70 million of TV ads a year from cereal manufacturers would be banned because they were promoting what the experts defined as unhealthy. The sector spent a total of £84 million on ads that year. In other words, the vast majority of its marketing effort would be wiped out. It had everything to lose. Because, as the House of Commons had been told, without marketing to manipulate our desires, we might not eat processed cereals at all.
Back at the Battle Creek Museum you can see how Kellogg’s would view that. Before exiting the exhibition into the shop, I passed a section on ‘global expansion’. ‘The company has rededicated itself to reaching 1.5 billion new cereal customers around the world in the next decade…and bringing about a fundamental change in eating habits.’ As well as advertizing in new markets, it has been sponsoring school nutrition programmes and health symposia for professionals. This activity is part of a ‘massive program of nutrition education directed at improving the world’s eating habits with accelerated expansion into countries where ready-to-eat cereal is unknown’, it proclaimed.
Improving the world’s eating habits has the attraction, as the nineteenth-century American entrepreneurs discovered, of being what economic analysts call a ‘high margin to cost business’. The raw materials of breakfast cereals, commodity grains, are cheap (or at least were cheap until biofuels recently entered the equation). US agricultural subsidies totalled $165 billion in the eleven years 1995 to 2005. Just five crops accounted for 90 per cent of the money – corn, rice, wheat, soya beans and cotton. That handful of ingredients I keep finding in everything. If you want to understand why all these commodities, cotton aside, make it not only in to the cat food but in to most other processed foods you eat, this is where you have to start.
One of the biggest costs is not the value of the ingredients, nor the cost of production, but the marketing, which as you might expect from all the activity described above, is typically 20 to 25 per cent of the sales value, according to analysts JP Morgan. About a quarter of your money is going not on the food but on the manufacturer’s cost of persuading you to buy it. That still leaves room for gross margins on processed cereals that are 40 to 45 per cent, with profit margins around the very healthy 17 per cent mark.
Start selling this kind of processed diet to new consumers in the booming economies of China and India and your profits, and those of the country that has dominated grain exports and trading, the US, will soar. This is what the food industry calls adding value. The added value is not nutritional value of course; quite the opposite. The added value is shareholder value, and as a very rough rule of thumb I reckon on nutritional value being stripped away in inverse proportion to the shareholder value added.
• Extracted from Eat Your Heart Out: Why the food business is bad for the planet and your health by Felicity Lawrence, published by Penguin. Buy both Felicity Lawrence’s books, Eat Your Heart Out (RRP £8.99) and Not on the Label (£9.99) for only £13 (save £5.98) or buy them individually for £7 each. Visit guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846
Voir de plus:
In his new book The Case Against Sugar, author Gary Taubes chronicles the sweetening of morning meals throughout the 20th century, from the introduction of Ranger Joe to Kellogg’s eventual candification
The dried-cereal industry had its roots in Battle Creek, Michigan, and the health-food movement of the late nineteenth century. The pioneers were John Harvey Kellogg, a physician who was a follower of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and his competitor and former patient, C. W. Post. Both operated what they called « sanitoriums » for the well-heeled dyspeptic,* and both believed that the path to health and happiness ran through the digestive tract. As Kellogg would say, « The causes of indigestion are responsible for more deaths than all other causes combined. » The idea of a breakfast flake that would aid digestion supposedly came to Kellogg in a midnight revelation, and he set to work on it the following morning. Post beat him to it, though, with his Grape Nuts, which by 1900 had earned him what was then the single largest, fastest legitimate fortune in America.
Post Grape Nuts were originally made with molasses and maltose from barley flour, but no cane or beet sugar. Kellogg’s first cornflakes were sugar-free as well. But Kellogg had put his younger brother, W.K., in charge of the development progress, and while the elder Kellogg was away in Europe in 1902, W.K. added sugar to the toasted cornflakes to improve the taste and the flaking process. John Harvey was said to be outraged when he returned – « he felt that sugar was unhealthy and argued vehemently against using it, » as the story is told in the 1995 history Cerealizing America. Consumers disagreed, though, and the sugar – a relatively trivial amount – stayed. Two years later, when Quaker Oats gave away a truly sugar-coated cereal at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, the company considered it candy, as did their customers, and chose not to market it, on the assumption that « America’s sweet tooth was a passing fad. » This turned out to be not quite correct.
It took 35 years for dried cereals, a health food, to begin the successful transformation into sugar-coated cereals, a hugely profitable breakfast candy. The process began with an industry outsider – Jim Rex, a Philadelphia heating-equipment salesman – and a line of thinking that seems almost incomprehensible in the context of the anti-sugar sentiments of today. As told in Cerealizing America, Rex was sitting at breakfast one day watching his children ladle spoonfuls of sugar atop their puffed-wheat cereal. « Sickened by the sugary excess, Rex began to think of ways he could get his kids to eat their cereal without plunging into the sugar bowl. The solution came to him in a flash of inspiration. Why not create a cereal ‘already sugar’d.' »
The result, Ranger Joe, was the first sugar-coated, presweetened cereal sold in America. By then, Post Cereals was already planning to roll out a competitor, Sugar Crisp, nationwide.
Post then began the trend of rationalizing how a company positioned as a producer of health foods could justify selling a cereal coated in sugar. Echoing the logic of Jim Rex, Post executives would argue that presweetened cereal actually contained less sugar than what children would add on their own. By adding sugar, Post was merely « trading off sugar carbohydrates for grain carbohydrates and sugar and starch are metabolized in exactly the same way. » Biochemists had already demonstrated that this was untrue, but it was not widely known. Either way, Post argued that « the nutritional value of the product » remained unchanged, with sugar calories replacing those from cereal grains. Sugar Crisp (now called Golden Crisp) sold spectacularly well, forcing the rest of the industry to play catch-up.
Kellogg’s set out to produce a sugar-coated version of its iconic cornflakes as if « it was their salvation, » releasing Sugar Frosted Flakes in 1952 and Sugar Smacks, a direct competitor to Post’s Sugar Crisp, a year later. Kellogg’s failed to produce a sugar-coated oat cereal and turned to chocolate instead. The company logic, again guided by nutritionists, was that « all this sweetness is not the best for children, [and] that bittersweet chocolate was good and healthy and it wouldn’t be harmful to them. » The result was Cocoa Krispies. When the first, bittersweet-flavored version didn’t sell, the company added even more sugar. « The new cereal, » as one Kellogg’s salesman put it, « was a dietary flop, and a sales bonanza. »
General Mills executives worried about the « possible dietary effects » of sugar-coated cereals, and its in-house nutritionist delayed the company’s entry into the presweetened market for years, but eventually they were overruled. The marketing team at General Mills argued that if the company didn’t compete, it wouldn’t survive. In 1953, General Mills released Sugar Smiles, a mixture of Wheaties and sugar-frosted Kix; by 1956, they had released three more sugar-coated cereals – Sugar Jets, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs.
Over the next twenty years, the cereal industry would create dozens of sugar-coated cereals, some with half their calories derived from sugar. The greatest advertising minds in the country would not only create animated characters to sell the cereals to children – Tony the Tiger, Mr. MaGoo, Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear, Sugar Bear and Linus the Lionhearted, the Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle – but give them entire Saturday-morning television shows dedicated to the task of doing so.
These companies would spend enormous sums marketing each cereal – six hundred million dollars total in a single year by the late 1960s, when the consumer advocate Ralph Nader took on the industry. Industry executives, bolstered by nutritionists – most famously, Fred Stare, founder and director of the nutrition department at Harvard – would justify the sale of sugar-coated cereals as a means to get kids to drink milk, or as part of a « healthy breakfast. » The magazine Consumer Reports may have captured this logic perfectly in 1986 when it claimed, « Eating any of the cereals would certainly provide better nutrition than eating no breakfast at all. »
The identical logic is still used today, when nutritionists and public-health authorities argue that children should be allowed to drink sugary chocolate milk because the benefit of obtaining the vitamins and minerals in the milk outweighs any danger that could come from drinking the sugar. This is based on a conception of nutrition science that dates back to the « new nutrition » of the 1920s, and whether it is true or not, or even vaguely true, was and still is the obvious question.
*Kellogg’s many famous patients included J. C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt and Johnny Weismuller.
Excerpted from The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes. Copyright © 2016 by Gary Taubes. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
Voir enfin:
The Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, later to be known as Kellog’s, was founded on February 19th, 1906.
John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg were brothers from a Seventh-day Adventist family in Battle Creek, Michigan. They had little education, because their parents expected Christ’s Second Coming before they would need it, but John Harvey managed to get a medical degree. He was a fanatical advocate of what he called ‘biologic living’, which involved vegetarianism, no alcohol or tobacco, no tea, coffee or condiments and minimal quantities of eggs and dairy products.
In his middle twenties he became president of an Adventist sanitarium at Battle Creek and practised his principles on the patients, who found the diet so monotonous that he, his wife Ella and his brother W.K., who was eight years younger, started experimenting with cereals. They set up the Sanitas Food Company and tried out products which included slow-baked cereal Granola biscuits, wheat flakes and cornflakes, peanut butter and a cereal-based coffee substitute. They stumbled on the wheat flakes, which they called Granose, by accident one night in 1894 when trying to manufacture an easily digestible form of bread. Granose was the world’s first flaked cereal product. Cornflakes made from toasted maize followed in 1898 and a version with a longer shelf-life in 1902.
The Kelloggs at first sold their products mainly by mail order to their ex-patients, but then began advertising in newspapers and on billboards, while rival entrepreneurs invaded the promising market and copying the Kellogg lines. An ex-patient of the sanitarium named C.W. Post made Grape Nuts, based on the Granola biscuits, and a cereal-based drink called Postum patterned on the Kellogg coffee substitute. By 1900 his Postum Cereal Company was making $3 million a year.
Competition waxed fierce and more than forty cereal companies were launched in the United States in the early 1900s. John Harvey Kellogg was not really interested in business, but in reforming American eating habits. The taciturn, austere W.K., on the other hand, was a born businessman and resented playing second fiddle to his more flamboyant brother, from whom he bought the rights to the manufacture of cornflakes. In 1906 W.K. founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. He spent heavily on advertising, including a campaign telling the reader to ‘wink at your grocer and see what you get’. What you got was a free sample of W.K.’s cornflakes. The campaign increased sales by a factor of fifteen in New York City and the company was rapidly profitable, but John Harvey’s Sanitas company continued in business and the brothers fell out over the Kellogg name, which they both used. In 1911 W.K. succeeded in a lawsuit to gain exclusive use of the Kellogg name in the United States, later extended to international markets after a legal battle that lasted from 1916-21. W.K. had started selling Bran Flakes in 1915 and All-Bran in 1916 and his firm was the Kellogg Cereal Company from 1922.
W.K. had been joined by his son John L. Kellogg, who invented All-Bran and streamlined the company’s operations until his father forced him out in 1925, partly for moral turpitude after John L. divorced his wife and married one of the office girls and partly because John L. got interested in oat-based products, which W.K. disapproved of. None of John L.’s successors lasted long under W.K.’s critical eye until in 1930 the old man gave a majority interest in the company to his charitable organization, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. When W.K. died in Battle Creek in 1951, aged ninety-one, Kellogg’s was the world leader in its field.
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It turns out that there are blue zones all over the world, where people live extra-long and extra-healthy lives. And their diets seem to have very little in common. Scientists have found blue zones in Corsica; Costa Rica; Okinawa, Japan; and Loma Linda, Calif.
Loma Linda is home to the largest population of Seventh Day Adventists in the U.S., and has a significantly lower mortality rate. Part of the reason may be because Adventists don’t drink or smoke, and most eat little or no meat. But the Adventists actually have much more in common with the Ikarians than anything diet-related.
They live in a community where they feel connected, they have a sense of belonging, and ultimately they feel cared for. Mario Garrett, a profession of gerontology at San Diego State University, says that Loma Linda, Ikaria, and other blue zones offer what is apparently the biggest health benefit of all: Connection to others.
« That’s why they’re living longer as a cluster, » Garrett says. « If there was no social environment we would find centenarians scattered across the world. »
http://healthyliving.msn.com/blogs/daily-apple-blog-post?post=99263c66-d36b-4a8c-ac93-50db5ed17d7e&_nwpt=1
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Remarkable! Its genuinely amazing article, I have got
much clear idea about from this article.
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THANKS TO THE COURAGE OF THIS INFANT AND HER PARENTS (« In those days, the advice to parents was to leave the baby here to die or take it home to die)
« Infants with heart disease yet to be born will someday soon have the opportunity to live, thanks to the courage of this infant and her parents.”
Leonard Lee Bailey (1984)
« In those days, the advice to parents was to leave the baby here to die or take it home to die. »
Leonard Lee Bailey
“It amazes me that 90 per cent of us can enjoy a juicy steak, paté de foie or a good joint of lamb and not face protesters at the meat market. [but] use a baboon’s heart to save the life of a child, however, and suddenly we are told that we all need a lesson in compassion for animals.”
Letter to the editor of Montreal’s Gazette
It was during a thoracic and cardiovascular surgery residency at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in the 1970s that he saw numerous otherwise healthy babies die from hypoplastic left heart syndrome — a congenital heart defect that defied successful reconstructive heart surgery. He returned to Loma Linda University in 1976 to join the faculty as an assistant professor at the School of Medicine. Over the next few years he performed more than 200 experimental transplantations in infant research animals to determine the feasibility of transplantation in young mammals. On October 26, 1984, Bailey and his team transplanted a baboon’s heart into “Baby Fae,” as she became known to the media. The procedure sharply divided the medical community and brought protest from animal rights groups, some of which sent protestors to the university and called the procedure “ghoulish tinkering” with human and animal life, media reports stated. But the procedure had widespread support, too. Baby Fae lived for 21 days, two weeks longer than any other previous inter-species transplant recipient…
https://spectrummagazine.org/news/2019/iconic-baby-fae-surgeon-leonard-bailey-dies-age-76
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THANKING THE ALMIGHTY (At that time, babies born with certain kinds of exotic heart disease were set aside to die, Leonard Bailey)
‘At that time, babies born with certain kinds of exotic heart disease weren’t even treated – they were set aside to die. And they uniformly did that. I had encountered some of those babies. We tried various things to see if we could prolong their lives. Mostly we prolonged their dying, maybe by a few days. But we had no success at all in saving them.
Leonard Lee Bailey
‘When we operate on these babies, the hope is that they will live longer than us. It’s nice to know that’s playing out. Often when we start a case we thank the Almighty that He has put us in this position to help and that the outcomes will be according to His will. »
Leonard Lee Bailey
« Baby Fae helped absolutely transform the landscape of pediatric heart transplants, generating unprecedented levels of public awarenes. People everywhere learned of the pressing need for infant organ donation. In addition, an entire generation of students was inspired to follow in Dr. Bailey’s footsteps and become pediatric surgeons. (…) His work also propelled Loma Linda University Health to become the world’s leading pediatric heart transplant center and led to innovations that enable surgeons to repair certain complex congenital heart defects instead of patients having to undergo a transplant. »
Loma Linda website
Leonard Lee Bailey was born on August 28, 1942, in Takoma Park, Maryland. He graduated from the nearby Columbia Union College (now Washington Adventist University) in 1964 and earned an MD from Loma Linda University School of Medicine in 1969 and did his residency at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, where he saw babies die from congenital heart defects. The 1984 surgery established Bailey as a leading authority and pioneer of human-to-human heart transplants, skyrocketing the small-town doctor to fame. But his surgery raised moral and ethical questions on the use of animals as an organ supermarket and cross-species transplants.
The backlash by animal rights activists and critics was so strong, he was suggested to wear a bullet-proof vest when he was scheduled to deliver a talk on the ethics of the Baby Fae operation. He ended up cancelling that appearance altogether.
In that operation on October 26, 1984 he gave Baby Fae – whose real name was Stephanie Fae Beauclair – a new chance at life as she was born premature with a congenital heart defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. At the time Bailey and others had been experimenting with cross-species transplants in the laboratory.
With no human infant heart available for transplant, Bailey decided on a radical procedure: when Baby Fae was 12 days old, he transplanted the tiny heart of a baboon into her body. She died 21 days later – two weeks longer than any other previous inter-species transplant recipient. The operation was seen as a pioneering scientific feat.
The year after Baby Fae’s operation, Bailey performed the first successful human infant-to-infant heart transplant. Bailey went on to perform nearly 400 infant heart transplants at Loma Linda, where he was a professor and surgeon-in-chief at Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital.
Bailey was known to roam the halls of the hospitals wearing neckties featuring Snoopy or Looney Tunes characters to humor his young patients.
Many of his infant heart-transplant patients came back to visit him as teenagers and adults and at least one went on to attend medical school…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7035179/Surgeon-transplanted-baboon-heart-baby-dies.html
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DAYS OF MIRACLE AND WONDER (And the baby with the baboon heart)
« These are the days of miracle and wonder (…) Medicine is magical and magical is art, the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart » …
Paul Simon
« Hope and dread – that’s right. That’s the way I see the world, a balance between the two, but coming down on the side of hope. That’s the only song where I had any fragment of lyric from the South Africa trip. One night I was falling asleep, somewhere on the edge of consciousness, and I thought, ”The way the camera follows him in slo-mo, the way he smiled at us all.” I had this image in my mind of the films of the Kennedy assassination, that slow-motion thing where you see it frame-by-frame, or the Reagan assassination attempt, where he’s walking along and then all of a sudden everything drops out of the camera, the camera turns this way and that, and then they play it over and over again. I don’t know why I had that image – maybe because there’s so much underlying violence going on in that country that is unspoken about. »
Paul Simon
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/paul-simon-african-odyssey-104029/
The Boy in the bubble (Paul Simon)
It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry
It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry
It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart
And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry, don’t cry
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GOD MADE ME DO IT (Religiously compelled to eat more healthily, Adventists tend to live longer and have lower cancer rates, study confirms)
Loma Linda is one of five ‘Blue Zones’, small pockets around the world where people tend to live well into their 90s and even their 100s, which includes towns in Costa Rica, Greece, Italy and Bhutan. Health is central to the Adventists’ faith and they have strict rules on diet, exercise and rest. Adventists typically avoid meat and dairy products and follow a ‘biblical diet’, or the way that those who lived thousands of years ago ate. It’s a vegetarian diet consisting of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Their go-to-snack is nuts. Residents don’t smoke, don’t drink alcohol or caffeine – sticking only to water – and exercise regularly. For the study, published in the online journal CANCER, the team looked at data on cancer rates and early death rates from the Adventist Health Study-2 and the US Census population. They found that Adventists had 33 percent lower rates of death from any cause and 30 percent lower rates of all cancers combined. When it came to specific cancers, Adventists had 30 percent lower rates of breast cancer, 16 percent lower rates of colorectal cancer, 50 percent lower rates of rectal cancer and 30 percent lower rates of lung cancer.
The team then looked at early death rates and incidence of all cancers among black Adventists compared with to the general black population. Black Adventists had 36 percent lower rates of early death and 22 percent lower rates of all cancers.
‘This is the first confirmation of previous reports, now using national populations,’ said lead author Dr Gary Fraser, a professor in the school of public health at Loma Linda University. ‘In addition, this is the first report that includes a comparison among black individuals alone.’
Researchers say that although their findings don’t specify why Adventists reap these health benefits, other studies have shown the benefits of a plant-based diet, suggesting the religious group has their high-veggie, low-meat diet to thank. A plant-based diet lowers the risk of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, high cholesterol, heart disease and even certain cancers. ‘Thus, the findings in this report comparing all Adventists…to average Americans are largely as expected,’ said Dr Fraser. ‘[It] strongly suggest[s] that these health advantages may be available to all Americans who choose similar diets, in addition, of course, to other well-known prudent lifestyle choices such as regular physical activity, avoiding smoking, and care with body weight.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7731947/Seventh-Day-Adventists-longer-life-expectancy-lower-cancer-risk-study-finds.html
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