by Paul A. Stitt
Nutrition and atruism not found in the center aisles of your grocery store
Paul Stitt, a biochemist working for Tenneco with a desire to end world hunger, sets out to create an economically feasible process whereby protein from bacteria can be grown on natural gas. Tenneco was happy to advertise this altruistic effort as they raised the price of their gas.
After a little over a year of 14 to 16-hour workdays, Stitt and his team succeeded in producing protein for 11 cents a pound. Stitt writes: “A plant covering one square mile could produce enough protein to feed 10 million people!” His reward? On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve his project was terminated and the staff fired. It seems there’s more profit in advertising altruistic efforts than in actually executing them.
Next stop: Quaker Oats Company where Stitt was eventually fired and blackballed by the food industry because he was more interested in creating nutritional food than in corporate sales and profit. With nowhere to go and a burning desire to feed people, he invested everything he had in a bakery and successfully produced nutritionally dense bread products made from whole grains and flax seeds.
In this informative and well-written book you’ll get an insider’s view of the unethical practices, greed, and disregard for human life and health by the food industry. You’ll also learn some of the ways that inferior nutrition leads to disease.
Stitt writes about the various projects he worked on at the food companies and their unethical practices to create cheap, tasty, nutritionally depleted food that will encourage you to eat more. You’ll learn that New and Improved doesn’t mean the company improved the quality of the food, but that they found a means of shaving a few cents off in production by substituting cheaper materials.
It’s a sad commentary on food politics to learn that pet food is tested on animals to determine its nutritional adequacy but human food is not tested on anyone because tests might show it to be harmful to health.
Stitt includes advice for improving your health (some of which I find outdated) and a chapter of recipes. Be advised, though, that he is heavily biased toward grains and plant nutrition. But his advice to eat whole foods and avoid processed foods is sound.
I wish everybody who shopped the center aisles could read this book.
Buy Beating the Food Giants from Amazon.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s a great book. It’s nice to see that there are a number of copies available. It was hard to find at one time.
It’s been a while since I read it, but is it the one that talks about how many chemicals there are in Oreo cookies, and how Oreos were specifically formulated to appeal to the greatest number of people possible in a way that signals their body to eat more than just one?
Scary stuff. It would be great if more people knew about the shady stuff that goes on to create some of their favorite packaged foods.
Yeah, it was pretty disgusting to read about what the food manufacturers were doing with food to make us eat more of it.
I put a review of Quaker Puffed Wheat on Amazon. To date 1 person found the review helpful, and 3 people did not. LOL. This is what I wrote:
While doing research in Quaker Oats’s library, he (Stitt) came upon a report describing tests done feeding the breakfast cereal Puffed Wheat to rats. Four groups of rats were fed the following:
Group 1: Whole-wheat kernels, water, vitamins and minerals.
Group 2: Puffed Wheat, water, vitamins and minerals.
Group 3: Water and white sugar.
Group 4: Water, vitamins and minerals.
Group 1 on the wheat lived for more than a year. Group 4 lived eight weeks. Group 3 lived for a month. But group 2 fed the Puffed Wheat, water and nutrients died in two weeks!
Stitt writes: “It wasn’t a matter of the rats dying of malnutrition; results like these suggest there was something actually toxic about the Puffed Wheat itself. Proteins are very similar to certain toxins in molecular structure, and the puffing process of putting the grain under 1500 pounds-per-square-inch of pressure, and then releasing it, may produce chemical changes which turn a nutritious grain into a poisonous substance. And Quaker has known about this toxicity since 1942.”
So please consider purchasing a cereal product that does not put the grains under such excessive pressure.
I love what you wrote! Horrifying stuff! And I used to eat that garbage! I’ll go to Amazon and mark your review as helpful for sure.