There’s plenty of truth to the notion we’re a nation of “one-liners” in the USA. We love to put things in nice neatly wrapped packages. Think apple a day keeps the doctor away, penny saved is a penny earned and let’s add to that list 5 a day (in fruits and vegetables) and 10,000 steps a day for fitness health.
While saving pennies is a good idea, what about those nutritional tag-lines, should you be basing your food choices on a marketing slogan? Or even how about that you must have 8 glasses a water a day? Is there real research to back up nationwide mantras?
Definite food for thought but also a big reason to look under the covers. Full disclosure I’m not a scientist or researcher, but I do believe in making solid choices when it comes to my food and fitness routines. That said I don’t wait with bated breath for the latest study or expert to tell me what works for my body.
On the flip side it’s also vital to understand that many of these catch all phrases are just that, a slogan. Thought up by marketing gurus not based on any substantial body of evidence.
5 a Day
Zoë Harcombe, Ph.D .has looked into the truth behind the 5 a day campaign or as she calls it “pick any number” campaign. I encourage you to read the full story on her website here. But below are a few gems. Vital to the discussion look at the companies and corporations who backed this slogan and how they would benefit from all of us eating 5 a day. (of which we don’t need)
“So where did the pick-a-number-a-day all start? It started as the “National five-a-day for better health” program in 1991 as a public-private partnership between the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Produce for Better Health Foundation. The programme started in California, the sunshine state, and has become the world’s largest public-private nutrition education initiative. All States in the USA have a five-a-day coordinator and, as we can see above, the programme has spread as far as Australia and Latvia. (Five-a-day has since been trademarked by the National Cancer Institute).
Why five-a-day? Why not? It’s a memorable number. It would have seemed achievable and it was the number of digits on one hand and, I would suggest, no more scientific than this. It was never the outcome of evidence based, thoroughly researched, scientific investigation. It was a marketing campaign – and the most successful nutrition marketing campaign that the world has seen.”
OK so you say, what’s wrong with getting people to eat more fruits and veg? Well for starters, more than half the nation is either diabetic or pre-diabetic. Do we really need to be encouraging them to eat more sugar, read fruit? And if the most popular veggie is the potato, read French Fry, another known insulin raising food (carbohydrate), is this healthy advice? No, we can do better.
It also promotes irrational thinking. Example one, I’m going to drink a smoothie that way I get my 5 a day all in one sitting. A couple excerpts below are taken from an article with Dr. Robert Lustig on drinking fruit.
“The problem with fruit juices or smoothies comes down to fiber,” says Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Lustig has published numerous studies (and one bestselling book) about sugar and how the human body responds to it. He explains that whole fruit contains two types of fiber—soluble and insoluble—which together, when chewed and swallowed, form a kind of gel that coats the upper part of your digestive system. Like a hair-catcher placed over a drain, this gel prevents the sugars in fruit from slipping into your blood stream en masse and overloading your liver. Instead, the sugars hang together until they reach a portion of your digestive tract called the jejunum. “What’s in the jejunum?” Lustig asks. “Bacteria, also known as your microbiome.” He says these health-promoting bacteria feast on those fruit sugars, and so prevent 25 percent or more of them from being absorbed into your liver and bloodstream.
When you juice or blend your fruits, none of this happens. “When you strain fruit into juice, you’re removing all the insoluble fiber,” he says. If you blend it instead, “the insoluble fiber gets sheared to smithereens.” In either case, the effect is similar: The digestion-helping gel doesn’t form, and your liver is bombed with fruit sugar, he says.
From the same article Barry Popkin, nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina says:
“If you eat an orange or two, you get full. But if you drink a glass of orange juice, you could be drinking the amount of sugar in four to six oranges—or more than a Coke—and you don’t feel full afterward.”
In other words you drink too much sugar. Not good for your liver or your appetite, you’ll be hungry again in no time. And why encourage bad behavior with your slogan? Asking for a friend.
10,000 Steps a Day
Oh, and what about the notion we all need to do 10,000 steps a day? Well hate to disappoint you but again it was a marketing plan. See below taken from the Guardian article here.
This is all despite the fact that 10,000 steps is a completely arbitrary figure, one that originates from a successful Japanese marketing campaign in the mid-60s. In an attempt to capitalise on the immense popularity of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the company Yamasa designed the world’s first wearable step-counter, a device called a manpo-kei, which translates as “10,000-step meter”
“There wasn’t really any evidence for it at the time,” says Prof David Bassett, head of kinesiology, recreation and sport studies at the University of Tennessee. “They just felt that was a number that was indicative of an active lifestyle and should be healthy.”
Get the idea, it’s all a slogan aka marketing ploy to get you to buy something be it more fruit or a Fitbit. Neither one is going to make you miraculously healthy.
Final note
At the end of the day finding your own path towards lifestyle sanity requires distancing yourself as much as possible from the grips of marketing gurus. Remember once upon a time doctors advised smoking as a healthy habit.
There are lots of snake oil sales people in the fields of health and wellness: stay vigilant, think critically and spend your money wisely.
Marketing is the devil.
Billy Bob Thornton
