Nutrition and capitalism: when profit is worth more than health

Bacon and eggs or cereals, two, three or five meals per day, detox juices, fast-food, diets, calories count…whether it’s for health or pleasure, we are bombarded with new information and sets of rules to shape our nutrition. Feeding oneself has never seemed so hard with advertising taking many various forms and invading our privacy. The various range of prices in food easily shows how social class determines the ability to access quality food but when looking at nutrition from an economic point of view it becomes clear that what we define as healthy and “good” is shaped by capitalism more than scientific facts.

A perfect example of that phenomenon is the cereal breakfast. Since its invention in the late 19th century, the cold cereal breakfast has become a staple of everyday nutrition. In Britain, statistics published in 2022 state that 20% of the population ate breakfast cereals at least once a day [1]. Even though a lot of their products are destined for adults, most of the marketing of cereal companies is designed to attract children. A key word in advertising is “energy” as the breakfast cereal is supposed to be the perfect quick way to consume all the calories needed to have an active morning. However, nutrition data on cereal boxes show that this calorie intake mostly comes from added sugar. This ingredient is very commonly found in a wide range of processed food products even if it doesn’t have any nutritious benefit and only serves as an energy booster or flavor enhancer. Healthline magazine article Breakfast Cereals: Healthy or Unhealthy? explained well all the effects added sugar can have on the body and how deceiving the marketing of cereals is. Furthermore, doctors from JAMA Internal Medicine conducted a study on the effects of sugar on health and found out that “people who got 17% to 21% of their calories from added sugar had a 38% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared with those who consumed 8% of their calories as added sugar” as said in an Harvard Health Publishing article [3]. The article also places ready-to-eat cereals number 6 on the list of products from which people consume added sugar. With these proven negative effects on health and sugar addiction issues studied by many scientists over the years like Avena, N.M., Rada, PHoebe B.G in their 2007 research [4], it’s easy to wonder why no form of control has been put in place and the answer is economical.

It is obviously understood that cereal companies and so many others in the food industry, maybe most of them, wouldn’t make such impressive profits if they couldn’t rely on cost-cutting methods like using added sugar as a flavor enhancer and the addicting effects to ensure a consistent clientele. Moreover, they have often used the freedom of choice of the consumers as justification even though these choices are made on the basis of poor nutritional education and lack of access to better options.

Even so, it’d be unwise to reduce this issue to sugar since it’s more about a system of advertisement built on deceiving and misleading that many actors take part in. Since this issue is global, example can be taken from many different places and thus the results of study on The extent and nature of television food advertising to children in Xi’an, China | BMC Public Health can be used. The study found that “frequency of food advertisements was 6 per hour per channel” and a 2010 study in Australia, USA, Italy, the Netherlands and United-Kingdom among children aged 6 to 11 found that the influence of food advertisement on obesity ranged from 4 to 40%, depending on the country [6]. These studies prove that the food industry advertisement has an impact on food consumption and thus health. Even if they were conducted on children, impact on adults is also evident and especially when looking at diets.

The registered dietitian and author Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, talks about the concept of “diet culture” and defines it as a system of beliefs that, among other things “worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue”, “promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years” and “demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating” [7]. Diets have been common during the last century but can be traced back to 2695 BC [8] and despite the many negative aspects that have been observed in some of them, new diets still appear. Their prevalence is a sign of a societal obsession with nutrition that seems to never get fixed on unique ideas but constantly go through very rarely profoundly studied, or misapplied, new beliefs. The question of what’s healthy and what isn’t has various and often unclear answers and the concept of healthiness itself has always been defined by both culture and science. While broadly speaking, dietitians recommendations are to have a diverse diet, food companies have stricter rules following the demonize-elevate pattern Christy Harrison has identified.

In our modern times, diet culture has grown with the rise of social media influencers and ever-changing beauty standards. The promotion of life-styles to advertise food products and especially use of the trust built between sellers and buyers in parasocial relationships is, in substance, no different to what has been done before but in its form, the scales and depth of influence these human advertisements have is more impactful than tv advertisement. Forbes published in 2021 an interview of Jamie Gilpin, Chief Marketing Offer of Sprout Social, an industry-leading provider of cloud-based social media management software and some numbers she gave show the importance of social-media in marketing [9]. Almost half of social media users (43%) say they use social media to discover brands and 36% use them to make purchases. With the impact food influencers have on what their followers eat [10], it’s understandable that nearly all business executives, Gilpin says, expect a rise in their social media marketing budget and in most cases, an at least 50% increase. It’s well known that marketing is crucial to a company's success but the idea of food, something so vital to public health, could be treated with the same mindset applied to commodities could raise concern.

On the whole, the information presented here draws a clear link between nutrition and the economy. What and how people eat is taught to them based on the dominant belief system and in westernized societies, this system is capitalism. Therefore, it’s possible to say that nutrition in capitalist societies is influenced more by economic gain than health concern as said in advertisement. Of course it is possible to live a healthy life in capitalist societies but this would depend on the standards applied and more importantly, the access to both quality products and efficient nutritional education. However, both of these seemed unattainable to most in societies with belief systems based on personal gain. Firstly, socio-economic situations determine one's ability to buy healthier food. The less wealthy populations have less flexibility due to lower budgets and other constraints, like time, and this adds to the other issue. Indeed, poor nutritional education is preponderant in lower income households so these populations are even more exposed, even if overall few people meet the criteria for a healthy diet [11]. Overall, it’s now obvious that the current system creates many health issues for its inherent imbalance and needs to be reviewed but it also has many benefits for the food industry, so why would they want to change it?

Fortunately, other alternatives exist. There are circular economy models being expanded in heavily modernized societies as mentalities around production and consumption evolve. Short food supply chains that already existed and were overwritten but industrialization and mass production are now facing growth in western countries. Many African, South American and Asian countries are examples of how short food supply chains can promote better nutrition since even lower income populations are able to buy a larger variety of products and they are fresher and produced with less damaging techniques. In countries more accustomed to mass produced and processed readily available products the transition is more difficult, especially with the higher prices of organic food, but there seems to have been a shift in how people want to consume food products and the market is slowly responding to that new demand. As consumers become more concerned and better educated on nutrition, they pressure the food industry into adapting to their needs.