On Saturday I read a New York Times article that really aggravated me, because it was steeped in hypocrisy and an obvious political agenda. It was regarding a partnership between an organization called the Dairy Management and Domino’s Pizza. They worked together to increase pizza sales for Domino’s by creating a pizza with 40 percent more cheese and developing a $12 million marketing campaign. The results of this partnership have been successful; customers love the new pizza and Domino’s sales are increasing.
What’s also increasing, however, is the saturated fat and calorie contents of these new cheesier pizzas: one slice has two-thirds of a day’s maximum amount of saturated fat! High in fat and calories, these new pizzas may be healthy for Domino’s bottom line, but far from healthy for the consumer.
You may wonder why I care so much about this little partnership between Dairy Management and Domino’s pizza. It’s obvious that an organization interested in diary consumption would want to market an increased use of cheese. Well, what I learned in this article is that the Dairy Management is a marketing creation of the USDA – the governing body that is at the heart of supposedly reversing our obesity crisis and discouraging the consumption of high fat and high calorie foods. Like extra cheesy pizza.
I found this information to be highly hypocritical. How can a government organization be affiliated with something like this? The government, through Dairy Management, is finding ways to put more cheese back in our diet – and this is after years of encouraging the use of low-fat milk, yogurt, and other dairy products. Of course, if Dairy Management was encouraging McDonalds to sell more yogurt parfaits or Wendy’s to add a cottage cheese side to their menu, that would be one thing. But no, they are encouraging a pizza chain to make a high fat product (pizza) even more unhealthy but using almost half as much more cheese.
Domino’s is not the only food chain associated with Dairy Management; apparently they have also worked with Taco Bell to create the cheesier Steak Quesadilla, which contains cheddar, pepper jack, mozzarella and a creamy sauce. The USDA praised Dairy Management’s work, saying in a report that “the item used an average of eight times more cheese than other items on their menu.” Nowhere did it mention that the new quesadilla contains more than three-quarters of the daily recommended level of saturated fat and sodium.
This article highlights the apparent discord and hypocrisy between the two interests of the USDA – on the one hand, a marketer and supporter of agricultural products, and on the other hand, “America’s nutrition police.” The article gave the example of past research extolling the benefits of dairy consumption on weight loss: “Dairy Management spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products, records and interviews show. The campaign went on for four years, ending in 2007, even though other researchers — one paid by Dairy Management itself — found no such weight-loss benefits.” While the USDA admits that cheese is high in saturated fat, it claims that low milk intake makes cheese an important item to consume in order to get appropriate calcium.
However, Dr. Walter C. Willett, who is the chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, thinks that the USDA would be better to not be involved in the issue of cheese consumption, regardless of milk and calcium intake: “The USDA should not be involved in these programs that are promoting foods that we are consuming too much of already. A small amount of good-flavored cheese can be compatible with a healthy diet, but consumption in the US in enormous and way beyond what is optimally healthy.” I would have to wholeheartedly agree.
The rest of the article explains the conception of Dairy Management, Inc., a nonprofit organization that was created in 1995. There is also much history regarding the USDA and its relationship to milk, cheese, and other dairy products. For example, the government has purchased excess cheese and butter from subsidized farmers since the Depression Era, so why wouldn’t they want to promote these less-healthy but abundant food products?
I feel as though there is a huge political agenda behind anything the USDA, FDA, or other agri-business-related government agency says or does these days. The USDA is speaking out of both sides of its mouth – warning of the health concerns of a diet high in saturated fat, while also using its nonprofit agency to create a multi-million-dollar campaign for extra cheesy pizza to sell to the public. With more than two-thirds of our population being overweight and obese, you would think the government would rather see food chains like Domino’s and Taco Bell fail than help them to create top-selling but artery-clogging products for public consumption.
No comments:
Post a Comment